On "Being Out of Touch"
I want to start here with this very specific thought: There's an informal fallacy called 'ad hominem' and it has a very obvious example to explain the fallacy. The fallacy literally translates as 'to the man' so rather than attacking the argument you attack the person making the argument and the example is almost always Benito Mussolini wanting the trains to run on time. So just because a fascist dictator says it, doesn't mean train punctuality is wrong.
While that may in some part inform you as to what the ad-hominem fallacy is, what I am specifically thinking about is a kind of meta-fallacy, or cognitive distortion that arises when there is a 'too-obvious' example people always go to. I feel what happens is that if we repeatedly use the same example to demonstrate the principle, it leads to people understanding only the example and not the principle.
Which brings me to 'being out of touch' a principle whose example is almost always overwhelmingly old people who don't realize that's not what the kids are saying anymore. A handy example might be myself, using a blog to put down thoughts when 'nobody blogs anymore' it's literally behind wordpress, tumblr, twitter, instagram, snapchat, instagram stories and tik tok. The go-to example for describing what it is to be out of touch is generally the rapidly changing youth culture. As beautifully demonstrated in this clip from 21-Jump Street:
Media in general is obsessed with youth, for various reasons, but I would stress not understanding 'youth culture' is but one of the ways to be out of touch. But young people can be badly out of touch, and people of all ages can be out of touch with really significant things.
So as an example of 'youth culture' being out of touch, I was thinking of late 80's film 'The Lost Boys' where the protagonist Michael meets the love interest Star. Michael when he learns Star's name says something like 'you're folks too huh?' and Star replies 'what?' and Michael says 'ex hippies. I came this close to being called Moonchild.'
Though I am too young to have been sexually active in the 80s, this clip spoke to my experience growing up on the other side of the pacific ocean. There are certainly trends in kids names, such that the majority of kids I grew up with had 'conventional' names even though you can see changes across generations, a lot less Dougs and Russells, more Lukes and Todds etc. But we occasionally came across kids almost exclusively girls called 'Crystal' 'Sky' 'Cloud' 'Rainbow' and we actually knew, like Michael that this was a legacy issue of when elder boomers were in small numbers part of an out-of-touch youth movement: hippies.
I find this a good example for two reasons:
1.) History can also skew our perception by fixating on a youth culture. Especially when we learn history via themed parties. Hardly anyone 15-25 during the summer of love, was actually a hippie. They probably bought Beatles LPs. Maybe grew a moustache or went bra-less. But picture your kid coming to you and asking to see photos of your Goth phase, or Ska phase, or Emo phase. Odds are you'll tell them 'I wasn't a fucking Emo.'
My parents speak condescendingly of people they knew that really got into astrology, or the idea they could levitate buildings with their mind, they knew of hippies, maybe appropriated some muted form of the fashion, but they weren't.
2.) The legacy of fashionable names as product of a subculture gives us reliable data to demonstrate that if you were a hippy in the late 60's early 70's you were actually out of touch not in touch, with the culture. A Star among the Sarahs, Jessicas, Kates, Melissas, Lisas, Tracys, Emilys, Jos, Claires, Lucys and Brooks sticks out. Even children can recognize that one of these names was not like the others. Kids I grew up with appeared to intuit that a 'name' doesn't literally describe it's meaning.
That example speaks to me, but there's others like 'Madison' becoming popular after Darryl Hannah's performance in Splash (this has actually had staying power, probably because in 1984 being 'in touch' didn't mandate seeing Splash) and more recently Khaleesi, who if genders still exist in 15 years will be meeting boys that explain 'they were this close to being called Tyrion.'
It's really tempting to get judgemental, the fact is that once you remove the scales from your eyes and see that their are more dimensions by which to be in touch than what the most visible minority of the cohort of people currently aged 16-25 are consuming in terms of culture; statistically you are almost certainly out of touch, because everybody is on most dimensions.
The danger is possessing the conceit that you are in touch. (I can only hope that the people at the center of any given youth scene have some kind of imposter syndrome, where they worry they have not yet discovered the authenticity necessary to find the real center of the scene.) A distinct outsider advantage is to be painfully aware your thumb is off the pulse of the majority.
My home city, has been among the world's regions to emerge from pandemic lock downs only to have cases spike and head back into lock downs. The press briefings from the Premier have provided many examples of being out of touch in other dimensions.
One of the first speculations offered as to why it was spreading so rapidly through the community for this second wave, was that it had gotten into a specific demographic that had large family gatherings. Here we can see that owing to demographics - specifically a declining birth rate, we had a majority of people completely out of touch with the reality of what it is like to have 6 aunts and 4 uncles, 32 cousins, and 3-5 siblings with possibly a few nephews and nieces in the mix, not to start estimating second cousins. The majority of households in the city are completely out of touch with the notion of seriously believing in God, going to church or mosque regularly and of course having large family gatherings.
But unfortunately, it's from this community it appears, allegedly to be where a company paying $18 an hour and no training to security guards for a quarantine hotel are drawn from.
Now two weeks into our second wave, we are seeing daily deaths climb up into double digits, and daily new cases approaching 1,000. In the first wave, Australia nationally accumulated less than 10,000 cases.
Bringing us to the latest (as of writing) speculation, that it has got into Aged care on account of insecure employment. the speculation, roughly is that it turns out the people that provide the 'care' in 'Aged care' are paid very little and underemployed in terms of hours, and have for some time been working at multiple facilities, meaning one staff member can spread Covid to three facilities.
Our state government are a party whose roots are in Industrial Action, a Workers Party, and this party is out of touch with the realities of people who have nothing to trade on but their labor. Most in my circle are directing their ire at the one person they saw in a hundred that wasn't complying with the mask order.
Lest I get bogged down in the wholly separate issue of the general inability to interpret data among the populace. The real spotlight of our second wave regarding being out of touch, is that it washes out the phenomena of blind spots - in terms of transmission risks - that most people, including our government didn't see because - we are more often than not - out of touch.
It's hard for me to pull out examples of when I'm out of touch, because the nature of being out of touch is that you don't know something, and it's hard to know what you don't know.
I would guess that I am largely out of touch with the subjective experience of being a woman. There's a possibly completely different way to experience my surroundings if I could just pass as female. I'm certainly out of touch with the plight of the Kurdish people in Turkey, I don't really know shit about that. I'm out of touch with living under a totalitarian regime. I am out of touch with the experience of being a baby-boomer.
There's another stark illustration. Australia like much of the anglosphere, the former colonies of the Commonwealth, has been having regular Black Lives Matter protests since the murder of George Floyd by police officers kicked them off. This is just my speculation, and it's not to the issue of police violence, police racism, police corruption, state sanctioned murder etc. but just as an example of being out of touch, it is much easier for our population to identify with the cause of BLM, even require it to signal that we should address our own domestic inequality and injustices regarding the indigenous populations, than it is for us to identify with the plight of the citizens of Hong Kong.
It may be owing to our Governments are being far more proactive with the Hong Kong situation, the US, UK, Australia and Canada making up a non-exhaustive list of nations actually critical of the Chinese Governments actions, offering aid to the citizens of HK and taking criticism for it. But the facts are really disparate and we can see the public's inability to grasp those differences. There is explicit documented legislation in one case outlawing things like criticizing the Chinese government and advocating for independence, in the other case we have documented examples of police incompetence and illegal activity, we have data on lenient sentences and documented 'blu-flu' style strike action to stifle reforms, and of course tweets from POTUS.
I would just suggest in the Australian bubble, we see an example of what it is like to be in-touch with the Borough of Brooklyn, the City of Austin, the state of California and completely out of touch with South East and Central Asia.
A conceit might be understanding 'the Green New Deal' and 'Defund the Police' and 'Extinction Rebellion' qualify us as in-touch. But relative to the people these often laudable causes need to actually sell, these slogans often demonstrate how out-of-touch their propagators are. 'Defund the Police' is certainly what you would call a police reform proposal if you wanted to turn off the public from supporting police reform. Referring to an Economic Stimulus package by a name that evokes an almost century old expansion of the government sector is almost certainly what you would title that package if you wanted the incumbent party, and even the most centrist aspects of your own party to have absolutely no chance of selling it to their constituents.
I like AOC, when she won that primary that launched her from nobody to upstart, I felt great hope in that she had exploited conceits and bad assumptions about who votes in a New York Democratic primary - she'd displaced the incumbent by going out and finding her own voter base realizing the opportunity their that her seniors were out of touch with. I think she has the capacity to raise the bar of recent US Presidents. I also think her behavior, and that of 'the squad' betrays that she is badly out of touch. Perhaps leading to her being parodied for grandstanding in the Netflix Series 'Space Force'.
I think AOC is out of touch with a large chunk of America, and much of her fan base is also. They will be dismissive when AOC takes the Oval Office and protests populated by red faced, overweight sweaty people wearing all-over-print XXL t-shirts of the American flag with fanny packs strapped under their gut segmenting it from their jean-shorts and white sneakers take to the streets with placards declaring 'Not Our President' and it will be assumed they are racist. Street interviews by journalists might even find soundbites of participants calling for her to go back to Cuba or Mexico or wherever.
That'll be a shame, because I genuinely believe based on the Green New Deal, that an AOC administration would probably address the issues for which those people will be marching. Namely job security and the issues that follow like health care, opioid addiction and crime. The means may wind up justifying the ends, but there's a nasty history of blow-back or 'no good dead goes unpunished.' This is highly speculative but I'd encourage you to speculate.
As John Stuart Mill put it: "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
A colleague was relaying to me some video he watched of someone asking people at a Climate march really bush-league questions about climate change, that they couldn't answer. I couldn't track down a likely candidate for the source material cited - plugging 'protester can't answer question' into a youtube search invites a dumpster fire of both out of touch political extremes.
Our mutual interest however was over the implications for the change our organization was trying to enact, and it was cited as an example of how often the public doesn't even understand what it is supporting. This doesn't surprise me, in any domain.
Tune in to pretty much any episode of the Athiest Experience to hear somebody call Matt Dillahunty to discuss their proof for God, and within 5 minutes it becomes clear that not only do they not understand Physics, Geology, the Hot Big Bang theory, Carbon and Radiometric Dating, Abiogenesis or the Theory of Evolution, they very often haven't read the bible so far as Exodus, or finished Genesis.
It is all too easy, to think you are in touch, ignoring all the various ways you are out of touch, but also to add insult to injury, be out of touch with the very thing you think makes you in touch.
While that may in some part inform you as to what the ad-hominem fallacy is, what I am specifically thinking about is a kind of meta-fallacy, or cognitive distortion that arises when there is a 'too-obvious' example people always go to. I feel what happens is that if we repeatedly use the same example to demonstrate the principle, it leads to people understanding only the example and not the principle.
Which brings me to 'being out of touch' a principle whose example is almost always overwhelmingly old people who don't realize that's not what the kids are saying anymore. A handy example might be myself, using a blog to put down thoughts when 'nobody blogs anymore' it's literally behind wordpress, tumblr, twitter, instagram, snapchat, instagram stories and tik tok. The go-to example for describing what it is to be out of touch is generally the rapidly changing youth culture. As beautifully demonstrated in this clip from 21-Jump Street:
Media in general is obsessed with youth, for various reasons, but I would stress not understanding 'youth culture' is but one of the ways to be out of touch. But young people can be badly out of touch, and people of all ages can be out of touch with really significant things.
So as an example of 'youth culture' being out of touch, I was thinking of late 80's film 'The Lost Boys' where the protagonist Michael meets the love interest Star. Michael when he learns Star's name says something like 'you're folks too huh?' and Star replies 'what?' and Michael says 'ex hippies. I came this close to being called Moonchild.'
Though I am too young to have been sexually active in the 80s, this clip spoke to my experience growing up on the other side of the pacific ocean. There are certainly trends in kids names, such that the majority of kids I grew up with had 'conventional' names even though you can see changes across generations, a lot less Dougs and Russells, more Lukes and Todds etc. But we occasionally came across kids almost exclusively girls called 'Crystal' 'Sky' 'Cloud' 'Rainbow' and we actually knew, like Michael that this was a legacy issue of when elder boomers were in small numbers part of an out-of-touch youth movement: hippies.
I find this a good example for two reasons:
1.) History can also skew our perception by fixating on a youth culture. Especially when we learn history via themed parties. Hardly anyone 15-25 during the summer of love, was actually a hippie. They probably bought Beatles LPs. Maybe grew a moustache or went bra-less. But picture your kid coming to you and asking to see photos of your Goth phase, or Ska phase, or Emo phase. Odds are you'll tell them 'I wasn't a fucking Emo.'
My parents speak condescendingly of people they knew that really got into astrology, or the idea they could levitate buildings with their mind, they knew of hippies, maybe appropriated some muted form of the fashion, but they weren't.
2.) The legacy of fashionable names as product of a subculture gives us reliable data to demonstrate that if you were a hippy in the late 60's early 70's you were actually out of touch not in touch, with the culture. A Star among the Sarahs, Jessicas, Kates, Melissas, Lisas, Tracys, Emilys, Jos, Claires, Lucys and Brooks sticks out. Even children can recognize that one of these names was not like the others. Kids I grew up with appeared to intuit that a 'name' doesn't literally describe it's meaning.
That example speaks to me, but there's others like 'Madison' becoming popular after Darryl Hannah's performance in Splash (this has actually had staying power, probably because in 1984 being 'in touch' didn't mandate seeing Splash) and more recently Khaleesi, who if genders still exist in 15 years will be meeting boys that explain 'they were this close to being called Tyrion.'
It's really tempting to get judgemental, the fact is that once you remove the scales from your eyes and see that their are more dimensions by which to be in touch than what the most visible minority of the cohort of people currently aged 16-25 are consuming in terms of culture; statistically you are almost certainly out of touch, because everybody is on most dimensions.
The danger is possessing the conceit that you are in touch. (I can only hope that the people at the center of any given youth scene have some kind of imposter syndrome, where they worry they have not yet discovered the authenticity necessary to find the real center of the scene.) A distinct outsider advantage is to be painfully aware your thumb is off the pulse of the majority.
My home city, has been among the world's regions to emerge from pandemic lock downs only to have cases spike and head back into lock downs. The press briefings from the Premier have provided many examples of being out of touch in other dimensions.
One of the first speculations offered as to why it was spreading so rapidly through the community for this second wave, was that it had gotten into a specific demographic that had large family gatherings. Here we can see that owing to demographics - specifically a declining birth rate, we had a majority of people completely out of touch with the reality of what it is like to have 6 aunts and 4 uncles, 32 cousins, and 3-5 siblings with possibly a few nephews and nieces in the mix, not to start estimating second cousins. The majority of households in the city are completely out of touch with the notion of seriously believing in God, going to church or mosque regularly and of course having large family gatherings.
But unfortunately, it's from this community it appears, allegedly to be where a company paying $18 an hour and no training to security guards for a quarantine hotel are drawn from.
Now two weeks into our second wave, we are seeing daily deaths climb up into double digits, and daily new cases approaching 1,000. In the first wave, Australia nationally accumulated less than 10,000 cases.
Bringing us to the latest (as of writing) speculation, that it has got into Aged care on account of insecure employment. the speculation, roughly is that it turns out the people that provide the 'care' in 'Aged care' are paid very little and underemployed in terms of hours, and have for some time been working at multiple facilities, meaning one staff member can spread Covid to three facilities.
Our state government are a party whose roots are in Industrial Action, a Workers Party, and this party is out of touch with the realities of people who have nothing to trade on but their labor. Most in my circle are directing their ire at the one person they saw in a hundred that wasn't complying with the mask order.
Lest I get bogged down in the wholly separate issue of the general inability to interpret data among the populace. The real spotlight of our second wave regarding being out of touch, is that it washes out the phenomena of blind spots - in terms of transmission risks - that most people, including our government didn't see because - we are more often than not - out of touch.
It's hard for me to pull out examples of when I'm out of touch, because the nature of being out of touch is that you don't know something, and it's hard to know what you don't know.
I would guess that I am largely out of touch with the subjective experience of being a woman. There's a possibly completely different way to experience my surroundings if I could just pass as female. I'm certainly out of touch with the plight of the Kurdish people in Turkey, I don't really know shit about that. I'm out of touch with living under a totalitarian regime. I am out of touch with the experience of being a baby-boomer.
There's another stark illustration. Australia like much of the anglosphere, the former colonies of the Commonwealth, has been having regular Black Lives Matter protests since the murder of George Floyd by police officers kicked them off. This is just my speculation, and it's not to the issue of police violence, police racism, police corruption, state sanctioned murder etc. but just as an example of being out of touch, it is much easier for our population to identify with the cause of BLM, even require it to signal that we should address our own domestic inequality and injustices regarding the indigenous populations, than it is for us to identify with the plight of the citizens of Hong Kong.
It may be owing to our Governments are being far more proactive with the Hong Kong situation, the US, UK, Australia and Canada making up a non-exhaustive list of nations actually critical of the Chinese Governments actions, offering aid to the citizens of HK and taking criticism for it. But the facts are really disparate and we can see the public's inability to grasp those differences. There is explicit documented legislation in one case outlawing things like criticizing the Chinese government and advocating for independence, in the other case we have documented examples of police incompetence and illegal activity, we have data on lenient sentences and documented 'blu-flu' style strike action to stifle reforms, and of course tweets from POTUS.
I would just suggest in the Australian bubble, we see an example of what it is like to be in-touch with the Borough of Brooklyn, the City of Austin, the state of California and completely out of touch with South East and Central Asia.
A conceit might be understanding 'the Green New Deal' and 'Defund the Police' and 'Extinction Rebellion' qualify us as in-touch. But relative to the people these often laudable causes need to actually sell, these slogans often demonstrate how out-of-touch their propagators are. 'Defund the Police' is certainly what you would call a police reform proposal if you wanted to turn off the public from supporting police reform. Referring to an Economic Stimulus package by a name that evokes an almost century old expansion of the government sector is almost certainly what you would title that package if you wanted the incumbent party, and even the most centrist aspects of your own party to have absolutely no chance of selling it to their constituents.
I like AOC, when she won that primary that launched her from nobody to upstart, I felt great hope in that she had exploited conceits and bad assumptions about who votes in a New York Democratic primary - she'd displaced the incumbent by going out and finding her own voter base realizing the opportunity their that her seniors were out of touch with. I think she has the capacity to raise the bar of recent US Presidents. I also think her behavior, and that of 'the squad' betrays that she is badly out of touch. Perhaps leading to her being parodied for grandstanding in the Netflix Series 'Space Force'.
I think AOC is out of touch with a large chunk of America, and much of her fan base is also. They will be dismissive when AOC takes the Oval Office and protests populated by red faced, overweight sweaty people wearing all-over-print XXL t-shirts of the American flag with fanny packs strapped under their gut segmenting it from their jean-shorts and white sneakers take to the streets with placards declaring 'Not Our President' and it will be assumed they are racist. Street interviews by journalists might even find soundbites of participants calling for her to go back to Cuba or Mexico or wherever.
That'll be a shame, because I genuinely believe based on the Green New Deal, that an AOC administration would probably address the issues for which those people will be marching. Namely job security and the issues that follow like health care, opioid addiction and crime. The means may wind up justifying the ends, but there's a nasty history of blow-back or 'no good dead goes unpunished.' This is highly speculative but I'd encourage you to speculate.
As John Stuart Mill put it: "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that."
A colleague was relaying to me some video he watched of someone asking people at a Climate march really bush-league questions about climate change, that they couldn't answer. I couldn't track down a likely candidate for the source material cited - plugging 'protester can't answer question' into a youtube search invites a dumpster fire of both out of touch political extremes.
Our mutual interest however was over the implications for the change our organization was trying to enact, and it was cited as an example of how often the public doesn't even understand what it is supporting. This doesn't surprise me, in any domain.
Tune in to pretty much any episode of the Athiest Experience to hear somebody call Matt Dillahunty to discuss their proof for God, and within 5 minutes it becomes clear that not only do they not understand Physics, Geology, the Hot Big Bang theory, Carbon and Radiometric Dating, Abiogenesis or the Theory of Evolution, they very often haven't read the bible so far as Exodus, or finished Genesis.
It is all too easy, to think you are in touch, ignoring all the various ways you are out of touch, but also to add insult to injury, be out of touch with the very thing you think makes you in touch.
No comments:
Post a Comment