A Monstrous Mess (collapse & shared narratives)

A Monstrous Mess

Painting in broad strokes, I would say that the discipline era began with the industrial revolution and eventually ended due to backlash in the form of the 1960’s counterculture. And what did the discipline era produce? It produced greatest economic and population booms in the history of mankind, the eradication or cure of most of the world’s deadliest diseases, world domination by Western civilization, and eventually culminated with a trip to the moon. That’s not a bad track record, if you ask me.

The thing is–innovation, population growth, and economic growth hasn’t gone away–but it’s harder to detect or has been obfuscated by cultural decay. It’s like putting a big ugly Hillary 2016 bumper sticker on a Ferrari…it’s still a functioning sports car, but its’s less aesthetically pleasing. The trend in technology for the past few decades has been from macro-sized innovations (planes, rockets, skyscrapers, mainframes, etc.) to micro-innovations (smart phones, apps, biotechnology, semiconductors, computer science, neurology, nanotechnology, fuel cell technology, etc.). So why hasn’t post-60’s liberalism done more to hinder innovation? I suspect the private sector plays an important role in insulating innovation and economic growth from the deleterious social effects of far-left liberalism. If it weren’t for the private sector and the ‘ownership society’, then there would have been collapse long ago. These SJW-professors alone obviously can’t sustain a civilization. How long can this last….I don’t know, but if past performance if predictive of future results, maybe a very long time.

Below is video of Aaron Clarey discussing that although America may be in decline, it’s still stronger than the rest of the world by comparison, which I agree. The strength of the US dollar will forestall collapse, perhaps indefinitely, as the rest of the world, which is more corrupt and has slower growth, swirls the drain.

If you’re on team blue, focus on taking a more disciplined approach (maybe we can’t actually afford to educate every disabled child, and maybe black crime can’t always be blamed on white people…).

Agree.

Other parts of the essay are cringeworthy (but when I read an article, I try to judge it not by its weakest parts, but try to extract value and insight where it can be found), but the indented readership isn’t the far-right, or more broadly, the ‘dissent right’, who already have their minds decided; rather, the message is more nuanced and intended for the undecided, which broadens its appeal and actually makes the essay more effective (as measured by the ability to change as many minds as possible) than had it been too extreme, because by being too extreme, readers who are undecided tend to respond by mentally shutting down (hitting the back button) than being receptive to being nudged. In post-2013 online journalism, for maximum effectiveness, the goal is to nudge the reader to your intended conclusion, not push him.

Centrism and the ‘rational middle‘ (or what I call the ‘sweet, boring middle’) are seeing rapid growth, with articles that frequently go viral on ‘smart’ sites such as Hacker News and Reddit, as part of the rise of ‘shared narratives’–themes that cross political boundaries that can be used to shift the Overton window by forging common ground between high-IQ members of the ‘blue tribe’ and the ‘red tribe’. The most common narratives are a shared distrust of elites (and how elites are insulated from the consequences of their actions), skepticism or rejection of ‘majoritarian’ systems, and the premonition that America and or civilization is ‘going in the wrong direction’. Both sides can relate to Trump being a symptom of the times. This also ties in with the rejection of both low-information conservationism and low-information liberalism. But methods that appeal to rationalism and sanity won’t work on the far-left, who are more emotional and blindly conformist than logical.