How We Got to Be So Self-Absorbed: The Long Story
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I always thought my alma mater, Stanford, was backwards about students suffering from depression for exactly that reason. Promoting positivity is great, unless it means ostracizing and shaming people who are already suffering. It was hard to be there because the highest ideals were positivity and productivity, and if you're depressed you're neither.
As I get older I realize more and more what a complex organism a human society is. If you change one factor, you can easily change other ones without meaning to.
I think it follows that you also take away the ability to honestly reflect upon and comprehend one's own behavior. For this reason I've come to the belief that the trend to encourage people to "never regret" limits self-growth and even limits empathy[1].
Maybe it's the latent Catholic in me, but regret and shame are very primitive and _necessary_ emotions. Yes, they're often abused by society and individuals to harm others. But to recognize that doesn't require that they should be denied or suppressed. Empathy and sympathy can be manipulated to harm people, too; that doesn't mean people should instead become hardened sociopaths. The only difference here is that empathy (especially when received) is pleasurable, while regret and shame are painful. But to believe that distinction makes one legitimate and constructive and the other illegitimate and destructive is fundamentally hedonistic and narcissistic. These emotions are largely environmental inputs (directly or indirectly, immediate and latent) that we need to learn to affirmatively assimilate to better understand ourselves and the world around us. Denying, suppressing, or categorically desensitizing oneself to these emotions is not assimilation; quite the opposite.
[1] For example, by obscuring one's own hypocrisy--living by a rule that says never judge oneself is much easier than living by a rule that says never judge someone else. So it exacerbates an asymmetry between understanding one's own secret motivations and understanding someone else's secret motivations.
EDIT: When positivity is divorced from addressing reality, bad things occur. The majority of positivity pushing I've experienced falls into this category. Happiness != willful ignorance.
AKA "second order effects"
It's interesting how language/vocabulary changed as well. "I'm upset because I wasn't productive today". When did people get told that their lot in life was to be productive. And who told them to think or talk like that? How did people start to view themselves as machines whose worth is measured by production? Also, where did the "motivation or get motivated" craze come from. All of a sudden, it's "Are you motivated?" or "Get motivated". For what? Why? All of the sudden it's motivation and productivity.
Hacker News is the worst about this. It's very creepy, the constant talk of "productivity". I recall a comment in one of the threads about Anthony Bourdain's suicide bemoaning the loss of productivity due to his death.
But that of course misses out on a huge chunk of understanding. I have been pretty successful compared with many people I grew up with - sure, I worked hard for that, but I also had the benefit of good parents, enough money, no discrimination, free education, and so on. It’s easy to forget that a kid from a less supportive background has to work harder to get to the same place. It’s not their fault that they had to work through college, or drop out to care for a family member.
Personal effort obviously contributes to success and failure. But it’s totally obvious that it’s not the only factor.
It’s the greatest factor of all. I grew up dirt poor with a drug addicted mother. Could you tell me how I could have possibly derived any benefit from blaming life for dealing me a bad hand? My point stands, the only thing I can do to move my life forward is focus on the things I can control. I can’t control how unfair the world is, but I can control what I take away from failure. This concept of privilege is used it such a messed up way. It doesn’t matter where you start out, the only thing you can do to make your life better is take responsibility for yourself. Your argument seems to boil down saying that if you have to try to hard you may as well just not bother because it’s not your fault.
It's rational and correct to tackle underlying causes of inequality. You're correct that the only thing that can be done is to deal with the situation you find yourself it; you're wrong that you "can’t control how unfair the world is". The world will remain unfair unless we all try to fix that situation – and drawing attention to is one of the steps required.
Everybody has responsibility for themselves. But that's not an excuse to shut people down for complaining about inequality.
We're born unequal. We're all born with different levels of physical and mental ability. We're also all born in different circumstances. This is simply the natural state of the world. Advocating for people to wallow in despair over this fact is far more harmful than beneficial. As I said, the only thing you can do to make a better life for yourself is to take responsibility for your life.
The only equality we can strive to achieve is equality of opportunity. Allowing people to compete on equal terms. Although we could improve on this point, we actually already do it pretty well. At no time in my life have I ever been denied an opportunity because I grew up poor, or because my mother was (and still is) a drug addict. I have found many opportunities to improve my life, and I have taken advantage of many of them.
Everything else you can't 'fix'. I guess if you wanted to destroy society you could enforce equal circumstances for everybody. You could tax income at 100%, and redistribute all resources perfectly equally between all members of society, but people would still be born with their own set of natural talents and abilities.
The message that "it's not your fault, it's inequality's fault" is so incredibly destructive and dangerous. The only person responsible for getting your life to where you want it to be is you.
Like I said, it is down to each individual to make the best with what they have. I don't advocate anybody "wallowing in despair", but I do fully support objecting to structural inequality that denies people the opportunity to compete fairly.
The only equality we can strive to achieve is equality of opportunity.
Obviously.
Although we could improve on this point, we actually already do it pretty well.
We do it shockingly badly by almost every metric.
At no time in my life have I ever been denied an opportunity because I grew up poor
I have no reason to think you don't believe that, but it's almost certainly not true. It's completely obvious that this is the case. If you grow up poor, it is harder to access better education, better nutrition, better medical care. These subsequently have an effect on which opportunities one can take advantage of.
I have found many opportunities to improve my life, and I have taken advantage of many of them.
That's awesome! It's the only way to improve one's own outcome. It doesn't invalidate the fact that those opportunities are harder to come by for people of some backgrounds.
redistribute all resources perfectly equally between all members of society, but people would still be born with their own set of natural talents and abilities.
We don't require complete redistribution nor absolute equality of circumstances in order to improve the situation. We can make sure that there are well-funded public schools, so that children from poor backgrounds can receive high-quality education. We can provide welfare systems and education programs so that kids have access to quality nutrition. We can provide universal medical care. We can try to eliminate structural racism or homophobia. There are all good things that are worth arguing for.
The message that "it's not your fault, it's inequality's fault" is so incredibly destructive and dangerous. The only person responsible for getting your life to where you want it to be is you.
Far more dangerous, in my opinion, is the view that unequal circumstances are unavoidable and the best thing to do is to "put up or shut up", as it were. I do not claim that anybody other than yourself is responsible for your own life, but I totally disagree that we should pretend inequality doesn't exist, or that we shouldn't bother fighting it. It's not an excuse for failure, but it's also something that very obviously makes it more likely.
There's a comic I quite like that illustrates this: http://thewireless.co.nz/articles/the-pencilsword-on-a-plate
I have never in my life been denied an opportunity because of my background. No school ever considered my background before admitting me. No employer ever considered my upbringing before offering me a job.
Again, unless you forcefully redistribute all material resources evenly (which as I’ve already said, doesn’t at all take into account natural endowments), then you’re never going to have everybody existing in an equal set of circumstances.
Inequality of outcomes will always and should always exist. In fact it’s not fair for inequality of outcomes to not exist, as people will never all produce equal value to society.
Furthermore, I went to a well funded public school. It was full of delinquents, but I made the most of my education, which has since served me very well. This was only possible because I took responsibility for myself, which no matter how much you deny it, is exactly what you are advocating against. I don’t know where you’re from, but I live in a society that provides equal protection under the law, and doesn’t allow people to discriminate based upon socioeconomic status. Sure, wealthy people will be able to invest more money into developing themselves, but I have been granted the opportunity to compete with those people on equal terms all my life, and I’ve more often than not come out ahead.
You haven’t substantiated your argument that equality of opportunity doesn’t exist in any way, and you continue to advocate for people to focus on the unfairness of their circumstances, rather than what they can do about it. In life all you can do is play the cards your dealt, shaking your fist at the sky will get you exactly nowhere.
Okay pal, I'll have to stop this conversation here – because I literally advocated the exact opposite of that and it's clear that your views are set, you're not reading what I wrote, and you're unlikely to be convinced. All the best!
The Loving Trap https://youtu.be/x1bX3F7uTrg
https://youtube.com/results?search_query=adam+curtis+parody
Corbett Report offers a good, longish (45m) take, non-parody:
E.g. one exercise conducted on the very first day - so that no one really new who anyone else was - involved 5 minutes of wandering around the room in silence, approaching another and looking at them for approx 5 secs. You then had to say one of two things: "I trust you." or "I don't trust you."
There was only one person who I labeled as untrustworthy. I vividly remember his image and that he looked like the stereotype of a used car salesman. However by the end of the seminar I found him to be a smart, witty, sensitive and caring individual. The exact opposite of my initial evaluation.
I knew that one shouldn't "judge a book by its cover" ever since I was little but that experience and others like them in those seminars really set me back on my heels. I still recall it when I have an initial adverse reaction to someone new.
Unfortunately after finishing the 2nd seminar the whole Amway/pyramid-scheme aspect of it kicked in and completely turned me off and I cut ties altogether. However I still think that I might be a little worse off for not having gone through that.
I think we're overthinking. We are fantasticaly intellectual creatures, and I personally enjoy ideas like these a lot. But, I think most of our psyche is just much simpler, more primitive.
What is the social setting we are living in, is it adequate? Do we have enough friends, shared mission, sense of collective belonging. Are we secure in our social lives? What is the condition of your life as a homo sapien?
Think of it this way. If we were alien zookeepers designing the sapien enclosure for maximum ethical zookeeping, what are the ideal conditions in the enclosure? What conditions would make the exhibits stressed or depressed.
Ideas matter, but indirectly. Does your introspective theology come with a community, how does that community interact?
Perhaps a part of self absorption is self discovery, finding a kindredness with others(and now we can kindle that with unlimited numbers online), which makes us feel the ability to constantly reinvent, which becomes an ongoing experiment.
In a way self absorption could be: how do we process and make relevant, to our own experience, all this new information the internet brings.
I say this as someone who was depressed about who I was, affected a lot of (positive, by most standards) change in myself over several years, but didn't catch my self-esteem up for several more. The initial painful spark to improve yourself can be good and is I think underrated today, but nurturing it can hurt you even as it makes you strong.
The way I look at it, we're social creatures, meant to live in tribes in close contact with our people. But capitalism and technology keep us isolated and in competition with each other. We live in houses with yards and fences and don't talk to each other. Social communication is now mostly done in isolation through a screen. Even music, which should bring a community together, is mostly now a solitary act done in private to drown out the rest of the world.
What do you guys think of this line of thought?
Yes, ironically, putting more people together creates more isolation. People live in extremely dense apartment housing in cities - and still don't know their neighbors, or want to know them.
We think of the world as moving in the direction of coming together; of connecting. Yet "belonging" and "apartness" are duals of each other. Without a sense of separate and exclusive group identities, we are all equally alone.
Consider that starvation was not a major cause of human death before the development of cities. In the hunter-gatherer days, a band would perish or survive together. Only when settlement and agriculture became the norm would we sit and watch our neighbors die of starvation.
When I hear Zuckerberg say he believes in connecting people, it makes me cringe. We're already over-connected. When you're connected to everyone, you're connected to no one. Isolation and ultimately self-absorption come from a loss of the clearly defined ingroup vs outgroup rivalry we thrive on.
We strive for universal human brotherhood; yet "kindness for all means coldness to your neighbor." There may be a way forward past both tribalism and contemporary nihilism, but we won't get there on the thin gruel of rational morality.
I spent two months traveling alone and didn't felt lonely at all.
So yeah I think the negative effects of loneliness are just the consequences of a natural mechanism to force us to be social.
The traditional society would have you live among your relatives. Which can be great if your relatives are great, and can be horrible if your relatives are horrible.
The modern society allows you to choose the place where you live freely... at least in theory. In practice, I think if you would ask most people how far they live from their best friends, and how far they would prefer to live from their best friends, those would be two very different numbers. So somehow the relative freedom is big enough to break extended families apart, but not big enough to bring best friends together. So instead of trading relatives for friends, we are trading relatives mostly for loneliness.
There are reasons why this happens. Buying a new house is expensive, and moving to the new house is a lot of work, so you only do it once or twice in your life. The moment when you decide to buy a house, and when you have enough money to do it, is not the same moment when your friend decides to buy a house and has enough money to do it. Despite enjoying the idea of living closer to each other, each of you probably has a strong opinion about the best place to live, and very likely it is not the same place. Etc. Every step in this chain is so logical... and yet, at the end, the outcome is unsatisfactory. Maybe we also suck as predicting what will make us happy in life.
Once I lived in a 10-minute walking distance from my best friend. It was amazing; I never felt so connected socially. Any day, any hour, I could just pick up my phone, ask "hey, would you like to meet now", and if yes, then in 10 minutes I could be with my friend. We talked a lot and played a lot of computer games, heh. It makes a large difference when it is 8PM, and you have to go to work the next day, and still you can insert an hour or two of human interaction if you need it.
These days my best friends live between 30 minutes and 2 hours away from me. It absolutely does not have the same dynamic. Visiting them is something that needs to be planned; for the more distant ones it is something that takes the whole day (2 hours there, 2 hours back, and we better spend a few hours together otherwise it was more traveling than socializing). I can no longer just do it spontaneously at the end of the working day. I need a large time interval, they need a large time intervals, and we have to coordinate these time intervals. So at the end, we meet more rarely than we would prefer to.
Now imagine the opposite situation, if somehow magically we could just live downstairs from each other, or across the street. We could meet anytime. Even anytime we go with kids to the playground, we could meet and talk there.
In theory, there is nothing preventing me and my best friends to coordinate and buy houses in the same city, on the same street. But in practice, almost no one does this. It would take money and time, you would have to sacrifice some of your preferences, you are not sure that the same people will be your best friends 10 years later, you do not want to move every 10 years to follow your new friendships, your best friends are not the same people as your partner's best friends, etc.
So we keep dreaming about something that feels like the right thing, but most likely we will never have it.
I wonder how much the society would be different if houses were like Lego bricks, and you could anytime relatively cheaply move your house from place A to place B (and if you change your mind later, move it back). Whenever you feel alone, if there is at least one person you would prefer to be with, move closer to them.
Good viewpoint but this article does the same thing as Esalen did - look inside and find your worth to extreme...of course every thing has a dark side and so the Esalen approach led to failure is because of self....
As I see, there are two ways to look at this. 1. We are all in a actors/actress in this play called life and there are always going to be good moments and bad moments. So human potential movement has its dark/bad side and there's that. 2. Secondly, I have been on a journey inwards so this is my perspective. It's valuable to look inside and find the authentic you..though the way our human society functions, we tend to follow/do what other people tell their image of us...so it's valuable to see one's authentic self. When I say authentic self, to me it means that one is able to find something worth doing that is also paying their bills...
Strange how influence works.
Anyway, beyond that... this is something I've been contemplating for a long time. I would actually agree with the other HN poster that New Thought was a contributing factor. I also locate part of the hyper-individualism at play today in the reaction to the Soviet Union's collectivism and Nazi Germany's mass movements. There seemed to have been a certain "inoculation" that was put in people's heads that "collaborating in large groups was e.v.i.l."; this later cropped out to Reagan's nostrum "government is the problem", along with the decline of labor, etc. The Me Decade was what, the 70s, and then on into the 80s. I recently read "We were as gods", a memoir & history about growing up in a Vermont commune in the 70s and how those communes fell apart. The author locates the major root cause (out of many factors) in the inability to form a proper governance mechanism and in the heavy "can't tell ME what to do" individualism in the movement.
So.... we have selfies, dysfunctional governments, libertarian fascism, and gig economies today. There are links here between all 4. (Although, an astute observer remarked that "self portraits" are an old tradition of painters, so it's prudent not to point a finger too, ehm, pointedly at the moderns).
Anyway, I view movements such as the DSA as a sign of a more healthy society struggling to come into being - the individual is important - but so is society and the group. N.b., this isn't particularly liberal as an idea goes - I seem to remember remarks on this from the Mass. Bay Colony chiefs, and at least one part of that concept goes back to early Christian writings.
What does this mean?
The Daily Beast had an excellent article on this in August, 2017:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/the-insidious-libertarian-to-al...
Also The New Yorker, "Are Bosses Dictators? | The New Yorker":
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/are-bosses-dicta...
And though a blog, this also cites Jane Meyer's Dark Money and the Kochs:
https://bennorton.com/the-libertarian-fascist-alliance/
Mark Ames has covered Reason Magazine's Holocaust denial:
https://pando.com/2014/07/24/as-reasons-editor-defends-its-r...
National Review:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/libertarians-sometime...
The case of William Regnery II, owner of Regnery Press, a libertarian and conservative publisher dating to the 1950s:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/aramroston/hes-spent-almost-20-year...
I suspect this gets a bit off track for the thread, but you asked an I answer.
Paragraph 1: Alt-right figure A identifies as libertarian. Alt-right figure B identifies as a former libertarian.
Paragraph 2: Alt-right figures C and D identify as libertarian. Alt-right figure E kicked out of libertarian conference. This last example seems to contradict the article's thesis.
Paragraph 3: There are many more conservatives than libertarians, thus a disproportionate number of today’s prominent alt-righters began as libertarians. Plain non-sequitur.
But suppose the conclusion were true. The fact that many X began as Y does not mean many Y will end up as X. Thus we have another fallacy. P(future alt-right | past libertarian) ≠ P(past libertarian | future alt-right).
Paragraph 5: Both libertarians and paleoconservatives are anti-interventionist. Ok? A shared belief does not make a shared ideology.
"And yet, it seems observably true that libertarianism is disproportionately a gateway drug to the alt-right. Again, the question is… why?"
The article has provided zero evidence for this claim, yet simply asserts it as "observably true". This is begging the question.
Paragraphs 8 and 9: Finally we get something interesting. A historical link between a subset (paleolibertarianism) of A (libertarianism) and B (the alt-right movement). None of this, however, supports the article's premise that there is an "insidious pipeline" from A to B, or that the former is "disproportionately a gateway drug" for the latter. This is a bait-and-switch.
Paragraph 10: Libertarianism is an unpopular/provocative view. Some people are drawn to unpopular/provocative views. Some of those people end up "merely passing through a libertarian phase" on their way to alt-right views. Therefore...?
Paragraph 11: Libertarianism takes a principled stance on freedom of speech, not just when it suits them (unlike the alt-right). Ok.
Paragraph 12: "Ultimately libertarianism is about peaceful cooperation―markets, civil society, global trade, peace." So libertarianism and fascism/alt-right are antithetical, which undermines the consistency of the phrase "libertarian fascism".
Paragraphs 13-15: Alt-right figure F describes his conversion from libertarianism to alt-right ideas.
Paragraph 16 points out the obvious: Cantwell was simply using libertarianism “as a shield for expressing a lot of disturbing viewpoints.”
The last few paragraphs boil down to the idea that some alt-rightists passed through a self-described "libertarian" phase. True. But this has nothing to do with the idea that there is an "insidious pipeline" from libertariansm to fascism, or that the former is "disproportionately a gateway drug" for the latter.
I agree with the conclusion that libertarians should distance themselves from alt-right and fascist ideas. After all, they're antithetical to libertarianism.
Let's take a step back from the article and return to the original comment. The GP used the phrase "libertarian fascism", yet nothing in the linked article supports the existence of such a thing. The article describes how alt-rightists abandoned libertarian ideas. It also describes a few public figures who claim they're both libertarian and alt-right, while being repudiated by other libertarians for the inconsistency of such a position. This is far from showing that libertarianism and fascism are ideologically compatible, as the phrase "libertarian fascism" seems to imply.
"Libertarian fascism" is a literal contradiction.
>"Libertarian fascism" is a literal contradiction.
So is war in the name of the "religion of Peace and Love", or being cruel in the name of Christ, or being pro "equality" (like communists) and creating a party elite.
One important aspect of any ideology is not just what it pays lip service to, but how people actually use it, and what it enables its followers to do.
And one common thread in all ideology A is the complain "yeah, X, Y, Z wasn't a REAL A".
Contradictions are the name of the game in all human affairs.
Tons of people chose the most humble public stances purely out of virtue signaling for example (the very opposite of being actually humble), or are "small government" ideologues with very powerful ties and influence in government (which they use to turn towards their private interests).
If someone calls themselves a pacifist but advocates violence, is that a "no true Scotsman"?
> but how people actually use it
Yet there is no evidence for the ridiculous claim that libertarianism is a "gateway drug" to fascism.
> and what it enables its followers to do
What exactly does libertarianism enable its followers to do, that leads to fascism?