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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Much of this modern malaise, I think, is traceable to two related phenomenon:

1. The lack of a real "competitor" in a geopolitical sense for the West. I don't think it is a coincidence that the US arguably had the most competence and scientific development circa ±1940 - 1990, when it had a direct competitor to measure itself against. Incompetence against the Nazis or Soviets got you killed, whereas today, nothing really happens (immediately.) The ancient Greeks (and subsequently Nietzsche) recognized the usefulness of competition toward keeping yourself sharp and called it agon. Ironically the rise of China can be seen as a good thing from this perspective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon

http://www.nietzschecircle.com/v3/2017/03/17/book-review-ago...

2. The loss of a civilization-wide teleological narrative. For the past ±1,500 years, that's been Christianity, in various forms. These days, there is no real "purpose" to the West, beyond some vague notions of individualism, choice and comfort. Institutions and standards become more and more difficult to maintain as a sense of apathy and the lack of a perceived future grows. Younger people especially seem unconvinced that there is anything waiting for them in 50 years.

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Regarding 2: I would love to see some of the community aspects of christianity/religion brought back in a secular form. It seems like believing in God isn't really the key part. It's interacting with your neighbours, which seems to be something really missing from a lot of the western world over the last few decades.

For sure, and I think that's a widespread political problem too. I wonder if online hostility and polarization would be reduced if people simply had calm in-person discussions with each other once a week. Social media is optimized for outrage and offensiveness.

"I wonder if online hostility and polarization would be reduced if people simply had calm in-person discussions with each other once a week"

That might work for some people? I don't know?

But I do know that the Charleston church shooter sat down with a bunch of little old ladies for the duration of a bible study engaging in, what I can only assume was, a calm in-person discussion. Then he blew their heads off.

Point is that, for some reason, the internet has a much stronger hold over people than do in person connections. People deeply believe they are more connected to people in their virtual spaces than they are to their neighbors or even physical friends. That sense of connection is real to those people. To some of those people, it's real enough to kill for.

That's not really a good counterexample. Do you think that Roof attended the bible study with the intent of actually discussing -- let alone listening to -- anything? It was almost without question just part of the setup for his attack.

I think you are arguing from outliers here. contrary to how it may seem on the news, mass shootings are quite rare events, even in the US. the fact that you and I have registered accounts and made at least one post on HN makes us outliers even in this community.

are there some people for whom virtual spaces are more real than their neighbors and IRL friends? sure, but most people don't seem to be like that. as far as I can tell, most people use social media to interact with an extended network of IRL friends/family. some people do try to get tons of followers that they don't know on instagram, but I think even this is best understood as jockeying for status among IRL peers.

note: IRL is a somewhat antiquated term this days, but I use it as a shorthand for "relationships that originate in in-person interactions". so if I had a friend A who moved away and befriended B there, but we all play video games together, B is still an IRL friend to me.

I've seen this in a lot of socialist circles -- an emphasis on building resilient communities, supporting your neighbors and fellow workers, and trying to lift everyone up.

I expect that there will be a strong reaction on this forum to the word 'socialist', but the communities you describe definitely still exist.

> the communities you describe definitely still exist

I agree that they do exist. But they don't seem to be mainstream as they once were, and I'd very much like to change that.

Me too! Join the DSA! :D

But also, historically, these sorts of communities have been targeted by governments. Police literally went to war with unions to break up community power for coal miners. While communism is different than socialism, there's a huge public smear campaign trying to couple those two together. (And, in fact, historically there were major pushes to blacklist folks who were connected to communism.)

But how would this idea work on a national scale?

Use popular media to normalize inviting your neighbors round for a bbq, asking your handy neighbor for help when you have a plumbing problem, regularly say hello and sometimes have a chat/catch up with neighbors to maintain lines of communication to make the above possible.

Basically using popular media to make people interact more IRL, suggest people consume less and basically de-throne media goes against the aligned incentives of the whole system and its success. Did we paint ourselves into a corner? Ok, the paint will dry eventually but it might be a completely different color from when it was wet.

Does it need to work on a national scale? Sometimes the best solutions come from the bottom up. On a national scale, the government just needs to get out of the way.

How many of them implemented it?

Quite a few. Maybe not at the national scale as much, but definitely at the community scale. For instance, socialists in Seattle are collecting donations to buy school supplies, laptops, tablets, etc. for kids who are unable to afford them while attending school from home. Another thing is paying bail for people who cannot afford it.

Interesting. At the risk of mentioning another trigger word I'll say the importance of supporting your community comes up a lot in libertarian circles as well. I think it shows that regardless of your political leanings or opinions on the responsibilities of the government, people in general value community and support circles.

The problem is that people disagree on (1) the size/scope of "a community" (2) the obligations a person has to said "community". It gets more complicated because the size and the obligations vary depending on what is being discussed. Most people are fairly comfortable with the idea of some kind of responsibility (even just taxes) towards national defense. Not many people are comfortable with the idea that they have responsibility for fixing the little bridge that crosses the small river in a town 300 miles away.

If "socialism" triggers a strong reaction, so should "Christianity" trigger the same reaction. It's hard to decouple Christianity, and Christ himself, from a lot of socialist ideals. There is some explanation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_socialism#History

People naturally operate more socialistically on a familial and friend basis. Perhaps, when we were more dependent on our local community for goods, services, protection, etc. we were more willing to extend this boundary further, but this is not our current economic/social order.

There's a famous summary of human nature: people are cooperative, altruistic and non-violent towards their in-group, and distrustful, violent and selfish towards their out-group.

I try to look at the long arc of human history as basically the story of how we grow the size of the "in-group" and shrink the size of the "out-group". It isn't easy, but we have made significant progress over the centuries.

I would be interested in some good resources on this if anyone has the background.

Humankind by rutger bregman is a current book on the topic.

Believing in God is not the key part, but believing in some unifying idea is necessary. People are extremely tribal. You need something that defines an "Us" for people the rally around.

I think you would need some kind of semi-strong central anchor, like religion to make this happen. And I don't really know if that exists anymore on a local geographic level.

Yes - CS Lewis pointed out the value of going to church in your local parish rather than shopping around for a church that suits you. Instead of having your beliefs reinforced by people who are like you, they are influenced by the people who happen to live near you. Those people may be more diverse in age, wealth and nationality than your other friends, but they are linked to you by a shared interest in your neighbourhood. This builds community and helps open minds.

He’s basically suggesting the exact opposite of the social media news feed, which we’ve proved to be hazardous.

> This builds community and helps open minds.

As someone who grew up in a small, rural Christian community, this is a nice sentiment, but far from true in my experience. People instead become highly punitive and disparaging towards anyone who does not think and behave exactly like them. Whatever community exists is built around a hateful exclusion of “the other.”

It certainly can go that way, yes.

I by no means want to invalidate your experience, but from someone else who also grew up in a rural Christian (European Lutheran) community, I can’t recall churchgoers talking or caring much about each other’s beliefs - there was the whole range from secularists who were in it for the local community through devout fundamentalists and AFAIK (left as a teenager so it’s possible I missed things) it was never an issue.

That being said, there was definitely a “fear of the other “ with people being extremely suspicious of the few handful of outsiders who moved in and didn’t have any connection like relatives, existing connections, or children going to school there.

It gets much stronger when politics become mixed up with religion like it is in the United States. They feel their values should be imposed on others via law and regulations (see the recent nomination of the Supreme Court judge here who is very likely to be the deciding vote in removing healthcare protections from millions as well as denying women the right to do what they want with their body, possibly rescinding rights of people of color and LGBQT+ people back to the 1950s where they were openly attacked by police and put into mental wards). It's going to be a mess unless the Democrats stack the Supreme Court and neuter it.

I suggest that's exactly what we see with the social media problems, the tribes are still insular and ignorant they're just bigger.

I think the shared belief, sense of purpose, and sense of something greater beyond this life _is_ a key to it. I don't think secularism can provide a strong enough motivation channeled into something productive. It can evoke strong emotion, but it usually ends with days of rage and such. Religion and belief in deity has pretty much always provided that (and even then there are lots of examples of that not working). I don't think we are going to buck the lessons of thousands of years of human history and find some kind of "enlightened secularism" that hasn't worked before.

I think the postmodern intellectual narratives are breaking it all in the West. The denial of objective truth, the rise of moral relativism, the notions about expressing the individual via many group identities, etc. It's a demoralizing view of life that is far-reaching in our contemporary culture. Even if you look at architecture, design and urban planning, you can find bits of that "wisdom" everywhere.

In addition, there is no positive vision of the future for society as a whole. What does the US look like in 2075 or 2100? All we get are dystopias.

I get that the World, and Europe in particular, got badly burnt by Utopias in the 20th century. But still seems like something is needed - especially given the looming geopolitical changes.

How is this not an argument that the masses are too stupid to handle themselves and need to be brainwashed for social control and stability? That's essentially what religion is, especially Abrahamic religions based on nothing but completely made up stories.

We're talking about purpose, not control.

It seems true to me that most individuals (myself included) are not up to the task of inventing a reason to exist. You can moan about how the stories are made up til Kingdom come, the point of it is practicing the belief. Otherwise you get what we're talking about in this thread, billions of people growing up believing nothing, having no rational reason to believe they are valuable, no reason to think the future warrants their contribution.

> I don't think we are going to buck the lessons of thousands of years of human history and find some kind of "enlightened secularism" that hasn't worked before.

this is a rather ethnocentric view of religion based on what is clearly a limited historical understanding evidently informed mostly by judeo-christianity. just to pick one counter-example: the ancient greeks sought virtue and purpose from philosophical inquiry, not from their religious practices, which were much more transactional.

When I think of non-communist "grand secular societal program", the only thing that comes to mind are some aspects of the NSDAP’s program.

Fortunately, there already exists a secular church, so to speak: Unitarian Universalism[0].

The modern Unitarian Universalist (UU) church is very welcoming to people of all faiths, religions, and creeds. You do not need to be atheist to join, nor do you need to believe in anything. Most congregations are very welcoming of new members.

Four US Presidents, eleven Nobel prize winners, and Sir Tim Berners-Lee are Unitarians. There are many Unitarians out there, though they do not tend to proselytize much, which is maybe why you haven't heard of them.

As always, finding the right congregation is very important. The UU church has a good site here to help:

https://www.uua.org/find

With the current Covid-19 crisis, local churches near you may be closed or only doing virtual services. Please check with the minister.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarianism

The actual Wikipedia link is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitarian_Universalism

Sorry! Thanks for the catch!

I attended my local UU church extensively as an atheist for awhile. 10/10 would recommend.

They are good people and a good community. I had a similar experience as an agnostic and was welcomed with open arms into their community. I move from that town a while back but still keep in touch with some of the members. Completely different experience than the close minded, judgemental,self possessed, obsessive evangelicals that I grew up around.

While Unitarian communities are awesome, they're still a niche thing. I don't see anything becoming nearly as dominant as the old Church used to be - not if we have our pick of ideologically diverse reading material, supportive subcultures for every individual interest, and the lack of severe punishment by God or His earthly sheriffs upon divergence.

People were united by a monopoly on education and political power. It's too bad that we're losing that ubiquitous societal fabric, but in the face of the alternative, seriously, good riddance.

If spiritualism is your thing though, do drop by at a Unitarian Church close to you. It's an interesting experience. Not for me, but still warmly recommended.

> It seems like believing in God isn't really the key part.

Maybe that is why the devil and the hell were introduced at some point ;-)

Edited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinian_theodicy

> Regarding 2: I would love to see some of the community aspects of christianity/religion brought back in a secular form.

You're essentially describing (secular) Humanism, e.g.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_humanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanists_UK

https://humanism.org.uk/civi/humanism/local

I don't have the actual study at hand, but it's cited in the book "The Righteous Mind".[1] They looked at independent communes[2] in the US in the 1800's, and 20 years after the founding of a commune, 6% of the secular ones were still around, as opposed to 39% of the religious ones. The latter had more things binding them. One insight: In religious communes, sacrifices (no alcohol, etc) correlated with longevity. In secular communities, there was no correlation. Over there, every sacrifice had to be argued about and justified. There was less thrash in religious communes.

(Just found the author of the study/studies: Sosis[3]

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Relig...

[2]: A commune being defined as a group of people not sharing kinship deciding to live and work together.

[3]: https://anthropology.uconn.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/944/...

Re: the Christianity part, I’d say that starting with the early 1800s until after WW2 the true teleological narrative was the idea of Progress (under different shapes and forms), it was only with the invention (and use) of the atomic bomb that its shine began to fade.

Absolutely, but the concept of Progress is directly tied to Christian (more specifically, Abrahamic) eschatology; i.e. the End Times and the notion of linear time. Compared to say, Hinduism, where traditionally time is seen as cyclical.

Your atom bomb mention is interesting considering Oppenheimer's Hinduism reference.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

The mainstream denominations of Christianity have always said very clearly that the history of salvation isn't the history of the world. We aren't here to build heaven on Earth, the Kingdom of God works on its own without us.

I'm talking about broader societal effects of religious beliefs. Abrahamic religions have a linear concept of time, which lends itself to viewing metaphysics and the world in a linear fashion. This is reflected in everything from capital-P Progress, to Millennialist movements, to Hegel and Marx, etc. It permeates everything.

Christopher Lasch wrote an entire book on how he considered the very concept of "progress" to be a rather recent phenomenon, and the problems it creates.

https://www.amazon.com/True-Only-Heaven-Progress-Critics/dp/...

Yep, great book!

I like "modern malaise" exactly because you are not going to get randomly killed.

"In the old days it was better", "golden age" - no it was not better. There were incompetent people in 1960's, there were scummy and incompetent clerks in 1500's. History lessons are about great people.

Maybe competition model is not that good, because instead of fighting for survival some people could start working on inventing their own things. Just like now billionaires are playing with rockets and having results. I would say there can be a lot of creativity when people are left alone and can build things, without having to think about threat of war. Going to the moon was necessity caused by knife on the throat, not some noble achievement because people wanted go to the moon. That is why no one went to the moon since then again.

I now full on agree with #1. The USA needs a strong China to be the other superpower.

Forgive me as I try to articulate what I'm thinking.

Being the sole super power somehow turned out to be bad thing. We (the USA) needs to an opponent, a competitor to better define and understand ourselves.

During the Cold War, aspirational preaching about human rights and democracy and capitalism was a way for us to differentiate ourselves from our opponents. A bit like Scott Galloway's thesis about Apple using privacy as brand laddering technique to differentiate itself from Google, Samsung, etc. Privacy is not central to Apple. But it makes for great ad copy.

I'm not saying USSR, China, whoever were (are) better or worse than the USA. I have no opinion and I really don't care. (Well, I do have an opinion. People in glass houses...)

What I am saying is the USA needs the idea of an opponent. So that domestically it (we) can set aside our differences to meet the external threat. And to have some kind of narrative to pitch why aligning with the USA is the better choice.

I don't think the USA is unique this way. Us vs them is base human psychology.

I do hope that The Powers That Be, on both sides, under stand the realpolitik is just kabuki and it matters don't degenerate into another Cold War. We don't need another arm's race.

there already is an arms race look at the spending the new Chinese air craft carriers and anti satellite tests and the USAs continued monstrous military budget.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/06/09/the-thucydides-trap/

Reviving a space program in particular into terraforming Mars is scientifically absurd but worthy goal. Should keep everyone nice and sharp.

I think you're missing half of #1...

While we did have to fight the Cold War, which led to much progress on a technological front, the US also had the advantage of reduced competition from previous world powers (UK, Germany, France, Japan, etc) which had been destroyed by WWII.

The Communists gave us focus. The end state of WWII provided the economic ability to put that focus to good use.

Or something like that. But, I do agree that the lack of a single unifying enemy is a problem when it comes to motivating society as a unit. It feels like we're more likely to be destroyed (as a nation) from internal factors than external, and that's not good.

2) Christianity is a terrible "driving force" and has a horrible history of "success" I can't believe anyone would actually use that on HN as evidence for anything. I believe humanism and secularism and respect for science is the only thing that is going to save humanity. Without belief in the value of the individual what use is any of the rest of it?

I think we need to distinguish between public and private institutions here. Government was always incompetent, wasteful average at best. Cost overruns have always been a fixture of the government machine.

That doesn't make it incompetent or wasteful if it's doing hard or novel things. Looking at the interstate highway system or trips to the moon or massive global health investments and dismissing them as over budget is absurd.

They are also assigned all the corner cases, last mile problems, and have a limited amount of choice surrounding which problem they solve.

I think all big organizations are wasteful and there is almost no way around it. My company is pretty successful but if every project there got reported publicly you would see a ton of totally failed projects and plenty of incompetence and internal corruption.

Consider the Asian countries' successes against the coronaplague. Meanwhile, the West is failing and the United States worst of all.

Europe is doing worse than the US on a cases per capita bais at the moment. Not good for either of us. I don't know how I can go to the upcoming funerals

Europe isn't doing worse, some European countries are doing better, some worse. There is no policy at the EU level regarding Covid-19.

Same with the US, but overall the record in Europe is worse. Some areas of the US have much better records than others.

Though honestly, the difference between the US can hardly be called drastically significant. Both are doing horid.

I think it comes down to a few factors such as being more trusting of their government measures, being used to wearing masks because of poor air quality and also not having transparency. In China, for example, it's hard to tell what the situation was because reporting was very state controlled. Also I'm not sure if Asian countries are battling with disinformation campaigns/conspiracy theories as much as their western counterparts do.

They are, but there is still more trust in the government. Speaking for the Chinese perspective - there are objective measures that most people can evaluate to say that their government has been successful. Sure, there's always disinformation on WeChat and such, but in general the central government is seen as competent and corruption is tolerated as an acceptable part of that. Remember that for the older generation, they literally went from rationing, food shortages, no education, etc., to now what we see of Shanghai/Beijing, their kids have decent access to higher education, travel, consumer goods, etc. Even South Korea/Japan/Taiwan have an older generation who can remember the difficulties of a past era.

The real question is whether this trend can continue forward. My bet is yes for the foreseeable future, but no power system lasts forever. So while we're seeing the gradual (seeming) decline of the West, we'll probably be repeating the pattern in a few decades for East Asia.

There appear to be other factors at work in Japan. Despite a high level of mask usage, a recent study found their infection rate was one of the highest in the world. Of course it wasn't a random sample so it's hard to tell what's really happening.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.21.20198796v...

is the US really worst of all? in some parts yes, in some parts no. it's a big place that offers a lot of autonomy to state and local governments. my take is that coronavirus has shown the strength of the US federal model. even with the woefully incompetent POTUS leading the executive branch, my state has been free to implement a more-or-less sane response to the pandemic. we shut down pretty hard early on, but now indoor dining is back, most shops are open, and we have a very low transmission rate.

Mind sharing which state? I might move in the future, and knowing that I can find sanity somewhere might be useful info...

I might as well just say it, it wouldn't be too hard to figure it out from my posting history at this point. I live in maryland. I should warn you though, while the coronavirus response has been pretty good imo, there's plenty of unrelated insanity in this state. also if you're a software engineer, I hope you like working for defense contractors.

Thanks!

Can't find it now, but there was an article somewhere that discussed coronadeaths per capita in the last three months, because we now have some ideas about treatment. The death rate in the US was 5 times that of Europe, IIRC. That's concerning because it says something about public health and healthcare delivery.

1) in the 1960s, we saw the rise of "operations research", a field of study specifically aimed at understanding and improving how (mostly large) human organizations operated. It was seen as part of the great hope of the future, but because it explicitly said that large organizations, including governments, could function better and do great things, it became seen as quite a problem for conservative/libertarian philosophy which wanted more support for the view that government is, as you put it yourself "always incompetent". OR is now fairly unfashionable field, and the continuing search for better ways to do things within human organizations has lost a lot of the urgency it had in the 60s and early 70s.

2) You have almost no idea how incompetent or wasteful most private organizations are, unless they are so bad that they go bankrupt and dissolve.

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