I recently read "Prosperity Without Growth" by Tim Jackson. My library copy, I got my hands on the first edition which must have been published some time in 2009.
In 2009 I had started my Economics & Finance degree. Part of it was an insatiably stupid curiosity as to whether the Economics profession would show any contrition. Whether my lectures would be delivered in any kind of panicked uncertainty. I even posed the question to one lecturer, as to whether Economics was in crisis, he related an anecdote about another economist being asked the same question and saying "no".
I would grow disillusioned with what impressed me as Economics (& Finances) performative natures. From the hip-hop duo Black sheep lyric, I began to describe myself as a "certified fool" the Global Financial Crisis was unlike the War on Terror which had dominated the previous 7 years of the Bush Administration and largely defined the political climate of Y2K, though a mostly abstract war it had ended the "end of history" period of the 90s, and while the Berlin Wall did come down in my lifetime, I was too young to bestow any significance upon it. I would grow a little older in the early 90s and be more salient of the first gulf war in Iraq's outbreak taking over broadcast television and depriving me of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and whatever else I wanted to watch at the time, and the first I can recall my mum ever being interested in television.
More annoying were the 92 Barcelona Olympics, which I had no interest in beyond the mascot and some brief European buffoonery at the opening ceremony. I was shocked and appalled by what it did to the television schedule for two whole weeks and said so in a one page essay I had to write for school which displeased the teacher immensely and I realized school intruded upon subjective opinion. A child was not allowed to dislike the Olympics, and that was a year I had a cool, good teacher.
Princess Diana died, then the Twin Towers came down after the planes were flown into them by terrorists a few years later.
That changed things. And weirdly, it changed things even though it was directly inconsequential. On globe sporting 6ish billion at the time, those attacks killed people in the thousands, which is very deadly and it was disturbing and gruesome. But not as deadly as the 2005 Kashmir earthquake which also displaced 2.8 million people.
The "war on terror" itself was much deadlier, just for US soldiers, cost trillions of dollars, destabilized the Middle East particularly Iraq and Afghanistan and beyond changes to Air flight safety making a second attack of that nature impossible as of September 12th, 2001 I don't think the world is any safer from Islamic violent extremism than it was before the US and "coalition of the willing" retaliated.
Yet it changed things, changed religiosity, changed discourse, changed media, changed immigration it changed a lot.
The Global financial crisis did not. It impacted just about everyone, everywhere albeit to differing degrees. Australia for example managed to insulate pretty well, and in turn in some ways suffers the most for being the odd one out with no market corrections.
But you know people lost a bunch of their retirement savings, people in other countries lost their houses, I had friends that lost their jobs.
If you will, because I have planes on the brain though, the Global Financial Crisis, the Subprime Mortgage Crisis, the Global Credit Crunch (all the same thing) did not change things, despite the massive impact it had on people everywhere.
So it was like watching a plane go down after its engines, wings and landing gear fell off, the fuselage caught on fire and killed all the passangers overnight, then watching governments as an extention of society scramble to put it all together again so that same plane we had just watched catestrophically fall apart could get back up in the skies.
Creating a localized space-time anomaly.
The Anomaly is This:
If you aren't still stuck in 2008, you are living in the past.
Tim Jackson's book "Prosperity without growth" 1st edition, is an interesting artefact because to suggest to the author in 2009 that society would not scrutinize the economic paradigms we have been living under (Neo-classical economics, neo-liberalism) he would be incredulous.
It's actually what needed to happen.
I also have planes on the brain, because I think of how Dave McRaney explained "Normalcy bias" using a real life example of people sitting in a plane waiting to be taxied back to the terminal to disembark when the fuselage roof was torn open and a massive fireball singed peoples head hair off, most people remained in their seats. Apparantly to survive you had just a few seconds to pop your seatbelt (the seatbelt sign was gone) jump onto the wing, run along it and then jump off onto the grass or something.
Now, I should explain that I tend to use "the economy" as a synonym for "what people are doing with their lives" I have not yet figured out how to talk about the economy, but people are notoriously myopic.
Your life, admittedly, might be about your family. Everything you do is for your family, to raise your children to give them the best chance of fulfillin their hopes and dreams.
Most people will be doing this, by working hard for some business in order to create access to food, shelter and education for their own children.
They may tell themselves a story about giving their kids opportunities, but we know, many parents don't want their children to take the "experiment with drugs, sex and poetry" opportunity presented to them, which would not have required their parents to work as hard, and are actively or passively aggressively shoving their kid toward doctor-lawyer end of the opportunity spectrum.
Someone can also fulfill this life-mission, by, for example, working in a tech-start up. Or not even, being an entrepreneur-accelerator where according to one guy on a podcast he comes up with an idea in his head and then sells it to someone else to get venture capital to start the business.
It is true, that venture capital disproportionately finance the minority of investments that generate the vast majority of profits, but they have done so by borrowing $$$ at 0% interest and giving it out to a person who wants to make an app that converts any recipe to quantities suitable for a gold-fish he call "Phish Phood" and when that fails they write off $$$ against their taxable income.
So you could have been handed borrowed money carrying no risk by someone who knows that so long as 1/30 of their investments turns a profit and doesn't go bust they are in the money because they only have to beat 1% and they won't be paying any tax, and you buy a house and enrol your kids in a ritzy school on a salary you pay yourself to be CEO of a tech startup developing an app that will never work and will never sell.
And that's kind of the good part of any developed economies. If you are a CEO of an Automotive company, you have been one in a long line of people that have basically been running these 20th century companies into the ground since the late 70s. You've worked really hard to get to a point where you can work really hard on prolonging the death of your company.
Add to that, the Ponzi schemes and you pretty much have neo-liberalism.
The economic ecosystem that allows this all should have been stripped down, examined, discussed, redesigned, tested and evaluated in 2009 and we should be leading very different lives.
The linked clip has one of those annoying edits, where they show you something coming up in the clip for 15 seconds, then start the clip which includes the first 15 seconds in it, making it an apt metaphor because this normalcy bias happened again with the Global Pandemic that kicked off this decade.
By far the most depressing thing about humanity, was its collective rush to get back to "business as usual" literal business as usual. But it is not it's own space-time anomaly because the 2009 one supercedes it. We were already stuck living in the past.
It's weird, isn't it. If you are stuck in 2009, you are still living in the future, but 2010 onwards is stuck in 2007.
I find myself in the camp of people who would hope it goes without saying that I condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk, as easily as I can condemn the content of most of what I've heard Charlie Kirk ever say.
In particular, on the one hand, I would hope it unnecessary for us to all check whether laws against murdering people should continue to be the law that governs our society, and on the other hand the content of Charlie Kirk's publicized speech I condemn as moronic.
That's about as much as I wish to say about the particulars of what I see as merely symptomatic of an education crisis I just don't think we've even begun to address.
Answers vs Understanding
"57" is the answer to the question, how old is Patricia Arquette. That this number signifies a measure of orbital journeys the Earth has taken around the sun since she was born, is to understand how we arrive at this answer.
I choose to make sense of the social world I live in, by entertaining the notion that one simply need answers to graduate from a tertiary education, answers suffice, understanding is optional.
Nor is this a dichotomy, where someone who can recite answers cannot demonstrate understanding, and that understanding is some meaningless artefact that cannot produce answers.
I suspect for numerous reasons, answers are the spine of our education and subsequent labour market.
Imagine if you can, handing out 30 copies of Hermine Melville's "Moby Dick" and then testing 30 students as to whether they understand it.
The best way, would be for a competent instructor to sit down and discuss the text with each and every student, and then accredit or discredit the student on their ability to comprehend a book about a whale that kills pretty much everybody.
Not only would a competent teacher find this assessment a considerable drain on their resources, but states would quickly find competent teachers in short supply.
So just due to sheer scarcity of resources, I understand how post-industrial revolution we could end up with an education system that treats recitations of answers as good-enough-proxy for understanding.
But that is only one factor as to how our education system permits people to apply effort to discovering the answers. Rather than generating their own answers through their own cognitive efforts.
Merit Systems
I'm a recent fan of Yale Law Professor Daniel Markowitz, who breaks down "merit" into three components:
1. Natural ability.
2. Effort.
3. Education and Training.
(I think) Natural ability is widely perceived more-or-less correctly to be distributed almost randomly among the population. Effort is also going to be largely genetic and thus distributed somewhat randomly, and crucially effort is incumbent upon an individual.
Education and training is where someone can put dollars to work for their child. And I think as economies rapidly grew in the 20th century, it is the sheer appeal of this intergenerational advantage that did not see education moving away from a gameable answer-based system to an intensive understanding-based system.
To obsess over Moby Dick like Captain Ahab, I think the marking workload is managed not only through class sizes but by attempting an objective grading formula. Where a teacher can mark the student by counting the quotations per-paragraph and then simply checking that the sentences are somewhat coherent.
3 quotes per paragraph in a two page essay = A+, 1 quote per paragraph = C+.
(I must confess, I do not have the teaching experience to know how a secondary teacher and upward grade an English essay. What I do have experience with was scoring Debates, where subjective though it is the process was largely a simplified method of grading participants relatively. The DAV standard practice was to give each kid a 75 then add or subtract points for basically whatever. One of my fellow adjudicators felt a kid was so shit at debating, they awarded them 0. This was a behaviour that earned them a "please explain" but on reflection, a score of 0 in debating should not just be theoretically possible, but probably considering how often students neglect to actually debate the issue at hand, or argue complete fallacies, particularly at the junior levels. The sport is, probably more failure than success.)
Crucially, this means there will be a market for study guides, that outline formulaic approaches to essay questions on Moby Dick in the same way one might approach quadratic equations.
For quite some time now, our schools could have been sending out report cards with really useful information like "tohm is highly competent at solving simultaneous equations with high level algebra but has nothing to say worth hearing by anyone."
Such a report could have been a collaborative effort between my Maths and Studio Art teachers.
I've heard Jonathon Haidt claim, several times, that critical thinking has been determined to be unteachable, hence education systems generally don't bother. My parents generation claims they had a subject that did indeed instruct them in thought, and perhaps it can't be taught, or perhaps one gets rusty without exercise, just as I'm sure I couldn't resit my high-school exams and still get into university.
The claim is increasingly striking me as suspicious, like all the evidence I've seen that claim diet and exercise do not work for weight loss, which I know, personally, to be untrue. I am going to guess there may be a complicating factor, 60 hour work weeks and an economy based on feeling anxious all the time in the case of weight loss, and possibly that all the other subjects students are taught emphasize answer-based assessment for which thinking is costly and risky.
Until the late 20th Century
What people largely now call "AI" I have found eye opening. Chatting with a friend I mentioned that I looked up how to get rid of Gemini "AI Summaries" in my google search results, and that I must be part of a sizeable demographic because Google had (and continue) to now have a distinct results page "web" (as opposed to "all") that replicates pre-knowledge panel Google search.
My friend was surprised, seemingly, that I do not find the AI summaries useful. This I in turn find surprising that anybody does.
I experience them (AI summaries) as sucking an entire thrift-store into a gas-powered wood chipper, taking all the debris then sticky taping it back into something that looks uncannily like a t-shirt, when I can just go into a thrift-store and buy a t-shirt.
What was enlightening was that my friend suggested I was a natural "researcher" or something, and while it may not describe my AI summary using friend, it opened up the possibility of people who had gotten where they are in life, by simply figuring out what answer the teacher wants.
A feat that can be accomplished without understanding.
Up until the late 20th Century, we could get away with an education system that largely trains people to imitate smart people. Which I suspect is why "AI" chatbots have proved to be a kind of Rorschach test, where people who find it useful see it as a perfectly good imitation of knowledge, which is all that possibly has ever been demanded of them. (I hope my personal bias is clear, regarding LLMs and as such if you feel I am calling you an idiot, you can use that bias to dismiss me handily).
As such, education is, possibly, dare I say even probably, by design highly gameable. And it is but an entrée to gaming a job market through credentialism, among other things.
One of my favourite pieces of commentary on our education system is "B-5 got the dinks" from greatest TV show ever The Wire:
The student has figured out the answer by observing the behaviour of the teacher, not by understanding basic arithmetic.
If my fears about education have any grounding, this might give rise to a scenario where people in occupations sometimes work to their KPIs and incentive structure, with complete disregard to the social good their firm ostensibly exists to produce. (eg. The CFO successfully cuts the budget by 30%, but the IT department then have to point out they've lost all their patient records when they cancelled the data warehousing subscription.)
By 1995 though, most public schools in most developed nations probably had a computer lab or library computer that gave students access to the internet.
Krusty Brand Imitation smart-people works when you can somewhat control what content is going in, where you can be sure your aerospace engineers are learning their physics from Da Vinci, Newton and Einstein and not Eric Weinstein on Joe Rogan podcasts.
By the time the dot-com bubble bursts in early 2000, there's been a massive overinvestment in internet infrastructure allowing India and Bangladesh to become tech-hubs and people to call internationally pretty much for free. From there, it seems likely that all control of information inputs, has been lost by the state. This includes not just propaganda, but also quality control.
The Last 10 Years
The last ten years I feel I've been watching how we do education getting its skull smashed in by Tumblr, Buzzfeed and Reddit.
Increased polarization seems like a pretty uncontroversial claim at this point. Though election results in both the UK and Australia may belie how severe it is.
My feeling is, that we've had a disastrous run on successfully disseminating rhetorical tricks.
In this case, I'm suggesting rhetorical tricks allow people to "win" arguments while achieving no understanding, just as brute-force rote learning answers to an exam can get you a desired grade with no understanding of the subject you obtained the grade in.
I'll illustrate what I mean by rhetorical tricks with examples from either polar extreme.
"Virtue signalling" is a useful idea, but somewhat redundant, we have other well-known words for the same behaviour like "lip-service" "all talk" or "hypocrite" but as a rhetorical trick, you first identify somebody you dislike, maybe they have blue hair, wear a rainbow flag patch or don't eat animal products. You then simply wait for them to assert some positive-value, then you accuse them of "virtue signalling" and they get flustered and confused BOOM! you "win".
"Mansplaining" is a useful idea, though the author of the collection of essays from which the meme is derived points out "you don't defeat condescension with condescension" or something to that effect. I see no reason "mansplaining" can't be appropriated and generalised to refer to all instances of a) explaining someone's own expertise to them as an amateur or b) defending the status quo as inevitable (such as Youtube channel Economics Explained, could all be described as mansplaining) but as a rhetorical trick it works thus - wait for anyone male to speak, attack them for mansplaining to you, they get flustered and apologetic BOOM! you "win".
The trouble being, the point of arguing isn't to win but to get at knowledge by having our own beliefs tested. Alas, I've been struggling with an intrusive and misanthropic thought of late which is...
That Most People Cannot Argue for Shit
This is a big problem. I mean, like I'm not confident most people can tell the difference between an argument and an assertion.
I however experience this more in the form of you want to have an argument with me about the existence of griffons, this is just an example because I don't need to single out any actual example of unpleasant arguments I've had with friends and loved ones.
You open up the debate with "I think griffins really exist." To which I reply "What do you mean griffons? Like the mythical creature or maybe the fossils of reptillian dinosaurs that possibly inspired the myths?"
While this might seem innocuous, I'm happy with the example, because in my experience the argument has already, and the relationship too, deteriorated beyond repair. A rapid fire of micro-expressions is exchanged via faces between just these two lines and as such allow me to articulate the subtext.
"So are you going to let me win an argument for once?" "You can win an argument whenever you like, but you haven't done even rudimentary homework, this is a waste of both our time."
And clearly, I'm fucking up, because this keeps happening to me but I'm starting to suspect that most people don't even realise that there is homework to be done.
The simplest theory I can concoct is a life-long learned habit of simply looking answers up as opposed to generating answers through cognitive effort. As such, once you have the google machine, for many, lacking an understanding as to why their teachers are authorities, everyone is a teacher.
Further muddying the waters, is that you can probably get through education courses in the social sciences and arts, by rote learning whole arguments you don't understand, and simply regurgitating them onto the page.
For example, if you got the essay question "Chomsky concedes that US military intervention was probably justified in world war II, why was that conflict exceptional?"
It's totally feasible to answer this in the same manner as a chatbot, with little (for a person) to no (LLMs) understanding of what you are saying. Where an LLM uses vast probability tables to form impressively coherent sentences, a student may simply answer:
"The US had a strategic interest in the European theatre of war that aligned with humane moral obligations, due to this alignment FDR's using the attacks on Pearl Harbour as pretext to military intervention in Europe was an exception to most nations track record of foreign direct intervention as an exercise in imperial power." or something, the thing is, that if we assumed in this made up example that we had sufficient resources to cross-examine my example answer, I could probably concede that the suggested alignment was not exceptional, and rather it probably was more exceptional in the cooperation between Soviet and British imperial powers to defeat the upstart empire of the Third Reich or something.
But our educations assessment capacities don't permit cross examination. Maybe in a history subject some fact checking can be done. (In year 7 I tried to fudge an essay on Nero used to being able to bullshit my way through humanities subjects by claiming Nero burned down Rome. A factual claim so egregious my SOSE teacher gave me an F)
I probably cannot emphasise, how much of my conversations with people, involve someone repeating what they heard. In part this is to be expected, knowledge is collaborative. What I would emphasize is how much is just people repeating what they have heard.
This results in phenomena where it is a cheap and dirty trick to ask someone "what's Capitalism?" "what do you mean Wokeism?" "what do you mean god?" "what do you mean by patriarchy?"
Such requests for clarity, are perhaps so poorly received and so often countered with indignation to suggest something everyone is talking about needs defining, that it can be missed that all the above examples are ideas either so broad or so vague that the invoker can't explain them to an educated adult, let alone a 6 year old child.
Taking the last one, about 5-6 years ago, awareness probably reached critical point to drive a rhetorical strategy extinct which was "it's not my job to explain it to you."
While the argument is on the surface sensible, if somebody is complaining about oppression under a system of patriarchy or whatever, then it increases the oppression via the cost of having to educate oppressors as to the nature of their oppression. It's just kind of strategically, a dead-end. Beneficiaries of the status quo have little immediate incentive to raise-their-own consciousness.
The only sense in which it is not a strategic-dead end, is to make dialogue impossible which can provide cover for simply not understanding the issues at hand.
I don't wish to single out and dump on feminism, rhetorical tricks are not something anyone has a monopoly on. Australia's worst unincarcerated export, Ken Ham founder of "Answers in Genesis" and "The Ark Experience" for example quite intuitively relies on "you weren't there, God was there and I have a special book that says what God says is true."
Ken Ham is kind of literally a very sad joke and while I am making sweeping statements, allow me to say that maybe, just maybe we are living in a world where we have allowed far too many people to gain credentials without understanding.
An Incomplete List of Examples
The first is heinousness creep. This has involved the appropriation of terms used to describe accurately specific heinous behaviour and applying it to behaviour that may be unpleasant but is perfectly acceptable. A popular one is "gaslighting".
Gaslighting was probably popularised by Brene Brown in reference to a movie where gas lights were used to create a real phenomena that was denied by a conspirator to convince a lady she couldn't trust her own senses. It is useful to describe the specific and heinous behaviour of deliberately attempting to convince someone else that they are going insane.
The term I feel, I can defend, was quickly appropriated to describe behaviour as banal as contradicting someone or lying. For example, in the final season of "You" The screenwriters have Kate, Joe's wife declare that she won't let him "gaslight" her anymore. I would struggle to think of a single example of Joe gaslighting Kate and the screenwriters have given us omnipotent insight into Joe's own state of deluded rationalization.
In 2016 an English teacher Nora Samaran wrote a blog post on "gaslighting" that cited as examples, just everyday lies that caused her to doubt her reading of non-verbal behaviour. Her example of gaslighting:
I phone a close male friend I’ve known for many years. I’m upset, and I’d like to vent, maybe hear some supportive loving words and maybe ask advice. This friend sometimes feels physiologically overwhelmed by emoting, and sometimes finds it brings him closer to people and welcomes it. In this moment, he snaps “I can’t talk right now, here,” and tosses the phone to his female partner, who enjoys these kinds of conversations.
I feel mildly hurt by the abruptness and since we’re all very close, I mention it to the partner, who relays that to him. He says from across the room “No no I’m not upset at all with you, I just am washing dishes and getting dinner ready, that’s all.” ~ Full example on her blog post here.
By this definition of gaslighting, every call center employee for decades is constantly gaslit every shift by men and women everywhere, every time someone tells them "I'm busy" when they actually mean "I don't wish to participate in this unsolicited call."
I assert, that the behaviour we might call "being short" with someone, and the behaviour of "lying" can simultaneously both be behaviours we condemn as falling short of ideals and virtue, but are banal rather than egregious. Nor do I accuse Nora of maliciously and deliberately skunking the concept of "gaslighting" to describe both egregious manipulation and abuse, and ordinary emotional incompetence. I think these rhetorical tricks are popular because they are intuitive.
So with heinousness creep, the rhetorical trick is to take something that is established as heinous and then expand the definition to describe quite ordinary, low-impact behaviour under that definition, so ordinary non-heinous behaviour can suddenly become heinous, like asking questions.
Similar but slightly different, is turning a useful construct into an ad-hominem. I'll switch poles to use "virtue signalling" again, where a dude sharing a feminist poem to express his feelings in the wake of a high profile murder of a woman in the streets who is known himself to be an abuser of women, is clear cut virtue signalling. A woman expressing the opinion "I believe women to be equal in dignity to men" is not, likely to be, virtue signalling unless they are a Supreme Court Justice about to overturn Wade v Roe.
Turning "virtue signalling" into an ad hominem is when you neglect to assess it based on some discrepancy between what people say they care about, vs how they act and what they invest most of their efforts in, and apply it simply as a marker of tribal affiliation. To signal, to one's own tribe that this person is an outsider and therefore is not to be listened to.
Perhaps the big one though, that the far-right Christian Nationalist tribe in the United States and seemingly UK are seizing upon but has firm foundation in the far-left or regressive left, is "speech is violence" which we can regard as perhaps the weaponization of "non-violent communication."
As a rhetorical trick, it is basically just censorship, where on the grounds of safety discussion can simply not take place. I recently witnessed a good-will attempt at this very tactic, a speaker made an appeal to their emotion "I'm not comfortable discussing this anymore." They were fortunately overruled on the grounds that the classroom was a safe space, that we were all adults and these ideas being foundational needed to be discussed.
And it is not that exposure to content, including speech, cannot be damaging, but this was a solved problem pre-internet. For example, if a parent took their 8 year old kid to see Nightmare on Elm Street III in the 80s, it was recognised by society, that that was on the parent.
In Eddie Murphy's Delirious (or maybe Raw, but chronologically I'm confident it is delirious) he points to a child in the audience and makes a joke about how they probably thought he'd be doing all his SNL characters that were clearly child friendly, and not talking about men getting aids from their wives kissing gay guys in the club and coming home with aids on their lips.
However, the itself-skunked-term "trauma" can be appealed to censor and shut down discussion for safety reasons, and it just cannot be legitimate.
As an easy example, the current president of the United States clearly gets upset emotionally and physiologically by any criticism of him ever. Most people on the left who employ this same rhetorical strategy would never concede that the media needs to be mindful of the harm they are doing to this clearly traumatised individual. I suspect most would feel, that such an individual is unfit to hold an office that necessitates constant scrutiny and criticism for public safety.
Yet, a similar principle is not employed when judging the fitness of people to participate in further education.
I feel it is legitimate for someone to say "I'm not comfortable with this conversation/where this is going etc." I feel it is incumbent on such an individual, to withdraw their participation from public discourse, on the most fundamental ethic - they cannot fail, they cannot lose an argument or even question and re-evaluate their own opinion. It is thus incumbent on others to accept the conclusions they have reached without justification. They are asserting their dominance.
Compounding Factors
One compounding factor making discussion and argument and subsequent knowledge difficult, if not impossible for many ill-equipped by an education focused on the industrious imitation of intelligent people capable of dealing with general novelty, is a strong interpretation of media effects.
Media effects are patently, observably weak. As Sean Penn portrayed Harvey Milk as saying "if its true we imitate our teachers we'd see a lot more nuns running around." and religion is one of the best examples of weak media effects.
Children have to be raised in a religious tradition, and religious communities often have to reinforce their messaging weakly at costly gatherings in order to sustain themselves. Religiosity declines with attendance and even with attendance we have numerous historical examples of persons no less immersed in a religious tradition than popes and bishops having illegitimate children right up to present day gay-homophobes.
Not to bash the bishop too much, a commonly cited example of media effects is how little boys media content is all about adventuring - pirates, knights, astronauts encouraging them to go out into the world on heroic adventures. Yet, look around you and ask how many men grow up to be heroic or adventurous? Most are risk averse, opting for safe careers, safe partners and keeping their heads down.
Little boys often don't become pro-athletes because of media effects, but instead have risk-averse wealthy organisations swoop in on the few that demonstrate early proficiency and pump more resources into their development with mixed results.
It is comforting to believe that the levers with which to move the world are as simple as the stories we tell, hence in my experience people overreact to discussion of 'dangerous' ideas. I'm going to go out on a limb here, and suggest that if you (on the left) were to read Mein Kampf, there is zero chance you will become a fascist neo-nazi skinhead. I credit you with having at the least, the tribal insecurities that render you unpersuadable by such media exposure, let alone the critical faculties to recognize a fallacious boring polemic. And you (on the right) are not going to be moved at all if exposed to Ibram X Kendhi's anti-racist baby, for the exact same reasons.
The problem is actually the opposite, when people only read Mein Kampf, and only read How to be Anti-racist. Yet, we have this massive compounding factor present based on a poorly evidenced but comforting idea that media effects are powerful. Tribal people everywhere are intuitively trying to avoid exposure to novel ideas.
The degree to which this is conscious, I do not know. While generally I feel the memefication of discourse into rhetorical tricks is an adaptive strategy for those who have not been prepared by life to argue, I also suspect that many experiencing some kind of cognitive dissonance in being socially invested in ideas that are, at least to them, incoherent and unintelligible, do employ these rhetorical strategies in bad faith.
The other compounding factor, I would refer to as the "Iago" effect, after the Shakespeare villain, who destroys not just Othello, but everybodies lives by creating non-existing threats. This is a tactic whereby you take a behaviour that didn't harm somebody, and then "educating" them to find insult and trauma. A kind of perversion of consciousness raising.
Usiing a right-wing example, getting people worked up over "they/them" pronouns, even though they revere defunct pronouns like "thee/thou" used in their holy books that are third person plural pronouns, or new plural pronouns like "yous" used in Australian English. (Yes, the only thing in Judaism and Christianity that God bothered to commit to writing was "Yous shall not kill").
The distinction is, Iago is not consciousness raising but shit stirring. Now there genuinely is a question of how charitable to be to the people who seem to think raising the salience of race (for example) was a good way to somehow reduce racism, and "educating" people into taking offense at the notion of color-blindness, or humanism.
That's been a big compounding factor, in just making people more sensitive and readier to take offense has made the institution of discourse far more socially fraught, even if we are no less free to exercise speech.
The Punchline
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -John F. Kennedy, assassinated by a lone nut-job.
I cannot find the specific one, but there was a great talk at Google by a guy talking about difficult conversation. He opened his talk by inviting members of the audience to turn to the person next to them and tell them how much they earn, how old they think the other person is and how attractive they find the other person out of ten.
The purpose was to cut straight to cultural taboos, and while taboo there's no real harm in the discomfort they cause for both speaker and listener.
Charlie Kirk's murder simply validates JFK's assertion. Now, this is how confirmation bias works, but I am betting that if we can't discuss, and more to the point of this post, can't think and can't argue, people will turn to violence.
"People with guns don't understand. That's why they get guns, too many misunderstandings." ~ Jerry Seinfeld, episode "The Little Kicks"
I feel it's important to emphasize my real conclusion. I am not saying that teachers don't try to teach students how to think. I feel the problem is our education system assesses students on their ability to furnish answers, and this does not require any understanding on the students' part.
This is the dark side of "what gets measured gets done" understanding is costly and tertiary places are scarce relative to demand. It is far more efficient for our students to simply brute force answers into their brains than generate them. It is also something money can easily buy and create more resource intensive forms of education with a narrower variation of results.
That was literally the secret sauce to my own secondary schools ability to have 30% of our year graduate among the top 10% of students state-wide. They handed us phonebook size print-outs of past exams and commercially licensed practice exams, so we could simply rehearse our final examinations until we all would get As.
They call this "spoon feeding" and I believe private (paid) school students have higher fail rates and drop out rates than public (free) school students, yet they obtain places at university in greater numbers than their hardier public school counterparts.
This is also, I feel, likely why we can graduate so many people, with so many qualifications that in practice are not well spoken, not great thinkers and can't argue for shit.
At the extremes, these people, unable to argue like a Cambridge student, eventually grab a gun and defend the honour of their tribe.
If you want to make the world a more peaceful place, get into an argument and start learning how to argue.
Firstly, I apologise, but around the outbreak of the the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I watched Timothy Snyder's Yale lecture series on Ukraine and he was talking about Putin's essay that was like "On the History of Russia and Ukraine" and he said to use "On" was to assert that something was indeed a thing, and I'm fairly confident that "dark academia" is a thing, but not confident that I understand it well enough to be sure I am talking about the thing most people who have any interest in "dark academia" would understand to be dark academia.
And I disclaim my ignorance because of this:
The trend emerged on social media site Tumblr in 2015, as an aesthetic that captured the imaginations of a maturing "Harry Potter generation" ~ From Wikipedia's page on the aesthetic.
So great, now I have to write disdainfully because I can't efficiently process away the emotions evoked by one of the most problematic symptoms of infantalism being that large cohort that cannot get past Harry Potter. This all could have been averted by the prefix "physically" before "maturing."
Harry Potter is a children's book. I've written about this before in a much longer post, just because Cedric Diggory dies and then a bunch of others does not make HP not a children's book even though the primary cast age-up. Had "The Deathly Hallows" opened with JK graphically describing Harry jerking off as he listened to Ron fingering Hermione because they thought he was asleep when they are fugitives at the beginning, then maybe Harry Potter would not be a series of children's books. But they didn't, we just assume that happened, but The Deathly Hallows is no IT by Steven King with a minors gangbang graphically rendered in prose.
I listened to Donna Tate's "The Secret History" which is generally credited as foundational to the Dark Academia genre. This will largely be what I am talking about when I talk about Dark Academia. I will dither a little upfront though to opine that I find "genres" not so helpful a term. Particularly when I look to music, genre is probably a bad way to approach music. There are either genres so big as to be meaningless - like do NOFX and Blink-182 really have anything meaningful in common? (no doubt more fans than we might assume) and others where a genre mostly consists of an act that basically is THE genre, and then a bunch of Chinatown junk store rip-offs, like Industrial is really just Nine Inch Nails and then what? Ministry okay, Marilyn Manson for one whole album (of his two big ones) and then pick through the list.
I suspect Dark Academia the literary genre is more of the latter type, that in some meaningful sense there's "The Secret History" and then a bunch of dime-store homages that boarder on fan fiction, near as I can discern.
So this I will say, I think "The Secret History" is a book for grown-ups, depending on one crucial factor - if you find the aesthetic the least interesting or most interesting aspect.
Meat and Potatoes
The heading is really just a milestone to commemorate me finally getting to what I want to talk about in this post - which is the central aesthetic of "The Secret History"
The title you can set aside, it is almost as perfectly neutral as "The Name of the Rose" in terms of describing the content of the story. It is also billed as a reverse-detective story, with opening lines revealing that Bunny was murdered, and I initially learned of this book by watching an old interview of Donna Tart by Charlie Rose.
What the secret history reminds me of most, is actually "The Great Gatsby" in an almost derivative way, it is allegedly set in 1985 but one could seriously defend an impression it is set in the Gilded Age. Henry reads pretty much as the mysterious Gatsby, Camilla as whoever Gatsby was in love with, Richard functions like Nick Carraway.
The inverted-detective story built no tension for me, which Tart had lured me in with in her interview by sighting Alfred Hitchcock's observation that tension doesn't come from not knowing what will happen, but from knowing there's a bomb under the table and watching diners obliviously eat their dinner as you dread what you know will happen to them - like I imagine the opening scene of "A Touch of Evil" which is Orson Welles not Hitchcock but whatever.
My thing, as the ebay ads of the moment say, is that I don't care enough about the central cast of characters to feel any tension at all. Their lives and deaths are statistics to me. In short, these are the kids that I would turn up to a college reunion and their aged adult faces would evoke in me the jamais vu that accompanies recognizing someone I had completely forgotten existed.
Richard, Henry, Bunny, Camilla, Charles and Francis are in short, kids on the margins. For me the most interesting aspect of The Secret History was Richard's journey into, and disillusionment of, a clique that turned out to just be unpopular kids.
For others though, I fear, this clique is the precise appeal of "The Secret History" the kind that 30 years after its publication take to tumblr and pinterest and put together vision boards like this:
In an abstract sense I get the appeal, but it's shit.
For my sensitivities, nothing tells me more about an aesthetic than the monomaniacal effort-at-arms-length Koreans and Japanese pour into their pastiches, which then get fetishized by the very cultures they refuse to interact with when making their counterfeits and create a bizarre sad-interest group that also functions as a feedback loop.
Where I can build a bridge with cognitive empathy, is that me and my friends would idly wish aloud to eachother that a bus might rock up and simply take the dicks in our year away, and the removal of two-or-three dickheads could yeild exponential results.
The thingamajig being, that I'm self aware enough to know that very likely I was on someone else's list of two-or-three dickheads they wish would get deported. Hell is other people, alas. We can choose our friends, but the offcuts don't go anywhere.
Donna Tartt paints a fantasy though, of an eccentric effete professor who handpicks 5 students to study Greek Classical literature as their major, and they do no other subjects and pretty much interact with nobody else. These kids dress like it's 1929, but elsewhere, everywhere it is 1985 so presumably they are hoofing it in wingtip shoes and button down shirts with tweed jackets and wire-framed spectacles while those studying practical majors are wearing acid washed shrink-to-fit Levi 501 distressed jeans, Van Helen cropped t-shirts, bangles and have permanents.
This is what "Dark Academia" has become to me, a censored-for-comfort Solzhenitsyn quote:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
The central cast of the Secret History impress upon me 5 Xenophobic children who simply do not wish to have to navigate a world populated entirely by their outgroup. Then there is misguided Richard the narrator, who mistakes these losers for elites and entangles himself with them, and is destroyed by their incest. There is also Julian, the professor, who is by Richard's subjective evaluation, awful and encourages the misguided children to pursue their deluded values. He is both gatekeeper and enabler.
This aspect of the Dark Academia is what I find morbidly fascinating. I feel the appeal of this kind of xenophobia is worth at the least, writing a blog post about, because it is rarely recognized as such.
Hirohito was a very naughty deity.
Nietzsche who was likely the darkest academic ever, had his "slave morality" a morality based on resentment, I don't buy wholesale Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, though I suspect phenomena akin to his "slave morality" would be empirically observable in a discipline like anthropology, religious studies, history, sociology etc. One such being a kind of "nerd xenophobia" definitely exhibited by incels, but also I suspect more garden variety unpopular kids.
And in that way, unpopular kids are likely not-too-different from so-called "popular" kids, at the cool table, they wind up in a clique that is roughly the same size as the population of unpopular kids and they likely are both consummed by feelings of inadequacy coped with via judgement of out-groupers.
For me, there is little difference between popular kids wishing everyone who couldn't afford to keep up with seasonal releases by Lulu-lemon would be barred from entering the Brighton Yacht club so they could enjoy an Apperol Spritz or whatever unbothered and unsullied by the outgroup, are morally equivalent to those who wish all the jocks and meatheads and Barbie dolls will be repelled by the Dean of Admissions so they can sit and summarize Proust to each other in the quadrangle, or whatever the appeal of Dark Academia is.
Ricardo is probably the true father of classical economics, and therefore neo-classical economics, which is the mainstream orthodoxy now. As such, there is clearly a lot David Ricardo got wrong, but one thing he cruelly got right is that "absolute advantage" is a thing. He is famous for modelling the benefits of trade by having Portugal produce wine (it was really good at that) and England produced wool or cloth or something (it was really good at that) and then by trading their surplus both economies are better off than if they allocate resources to producing wine and cloth in-house specifically.
That is comparative advantage, and I think some people lack the observational skills not just to miss that the race doesn't always go to the swift nor the battle to the strong etc. but that they don't observe that the athletically gifted can often be academically gifted also, and that the reverse can be tragically true as well, where somebody with no athletic ability can be twice cursed with no real academic ability either. Hence you can find in Oxbridge no-doubt, students reading in Law or Medicine (I don't know how their archaic system works) doing rowing and cricket on the weekend, where those who read Sociology (I don't know) eat Doritos (I know the british call these "Nachos" and pronounce it wrong despite the reputations of Oxbridge) and drink mountain dew and have little awareness of what day of the week it is.
Dark Academia isn't cringe because it doesn't impress me as having risen to even that level of self-awareness, it isn't obliviousness either, nor oblivion. Its an immature person's idea of maturity, maturity as liberation abrogating all social obligations to cooperate with the full gamut of human quality that would better be described as "infancy" than maturity. The seeking of sanctums preferably indoor ones, under the misguided notion that anxiety is "out there" rather than within.
Whereas actual maturity, involves a lot of acceptance, especially of responsibility. It is in many senses, an act of making way for the immature.
Concluding remarks
Okay, you probably get that I'm not a fan of Dark Academia, is Donna Tartt's book worth reading? Yes. Just don't go nuts, and there's better books for sure that I'd read first, so many one could be forgiven for not getting around to it. That said, The Secret History is one to read sooner than Harry Potter, provided you are not a child. Children's books are appropriate for children, and grown up books have more utility for adults.
More important to say than that though, is that I firmly believe that responsibility is a prerequisite of maturity, and the meting out of meaningful responsibility has been less and less generous since the late 70s, I suspect rivalling only growing wealth inequality as a social transfer.
Remaining a child into your mid-20s or even early 30s is somewhat appropriate to the circumstances the economy presents young people with. Forget the "AI" shit, due to quirks of habit and sensitivity we have been operating in an eccentric, inefficient and irrational economy for decades already.
Boomers entered executive positions in the late 80s for superstars, and early 90s for the mediocre and 40 years later they are largely still there. They are retiring and dying off in record numbers, but consider Gen X in a holding pattern for 30 years.
Yeah, fucken play quidditch then, doomscroll tik tok videos, there's no rush particularly for the mediocre for you to be called in to the economy to do any chores. There's already 6 people lifting the couch and a 7th would get in the way.
The real issue, is the xenophobia, you may not need to mature and in some ways it may be better if you take your sweet time doing it. But these exclusive cliques aren't good for anybody and its better if you learn to play nice.
There is plenty of pressure on the jocks to play nice, to stop bullying. Pressure on unpopular kids to socialize - as in, not just interact with others, but to learn to navigate social situations - has never been lower. I fear there are many that regard this as progress, and that's not even counting the screen writer of The Predator 2018 that propagates the idea that the non-verbal autistic are actually the next step of human evolution as well as getting every single other thing one could get wrong in a movie wrong making for a fascinating case study in cinema.
Solidarity with the precariat, it is the fastest growing class. Get out of your xenophobic lifeboat and talk to your uber driver, answer fucking phone calls. You can still spend most of your time at play, just your schema for life can't be "Mum! Dad!" romanticisation of Oedipus Rex. If your childhood was deprived of unsupervised play, a campus in your 20s is a great place to redress it, just...try not to get raped.
My sister had a wedding to attend to in Italy, friends from the UK to catch up with, and there I was taking an advanced after-life I wasn't sure I'd earned in Zena's Apparizione neighbourhood where rainbows curved for me, fire flies glowed for me, songbirds sang for me, honeybees buzzed for me and strangers said "ciao" and "bon giorno".
not mine, credit in corner.
I was running an experiment, and early results were promising - for me, the way to travel was to be somewhere, a tonic for something that had previously done my head in, which was travel in order to do something. El diablo has always found trabajo por mis manos inactivo and yes I know that's Spanish but the Devil certainly isn't from Zena, he's going to be Spanish (according to La Leyenda Negra) or Venetian like those terrible blinds for perverts.
My sister being younger wasn't there yet, and is perhaps just different, for I sense that to this day when she travels she wants to do stuff.
So with a nominal day or two to transit in and out of Zena, she suggested we Ryan-hop from Pisa, Tuscany to Trapani, Sicily to Pantellaria, end of the Earth. To which I countered "I wanna take a ferry ride on the Mediterranean" inspired by how easy Rick Stein made it look to just hope over to Corsica or Sardinia and I figured island hopping in the Mediterranean must be easy as breathing around these parts, "let's take a ferry to Pantellaria." So we bought return tickets to Trapani. For, if I was to sacrifice some of my 90 days tourist Visa to somewhere other than Zena, Mercantile Princess, I may as well cross off my ambition to take a ferry somewhere.
Anna and I had Focaccia down in Porto Anticho, and I showed her what had become my favourite lunch spot - a place where you could get a 4 euro meal that fed mostly stevedores and sailors, and if you dined in you would see a cockroach for sure and maybe a rat, but the food was just that delicious. I can't remember what else we saw or did, there certainly was not enough time to share all of Zena I had absorbed, and I must have been about mid-way so there was plenty for me left to absorb.
We trained down to Pisa, with enough time to get lunch from an Afghan kitchen that simply served us two portions of food, and time to take deliberately misaligned photos of us "holding the tower of Pisa up" before we were off to soak up the heady ambience of Pisa's Ryan Air terminal at the Gallileo airport.
We ate our Afghani food just outside the airport, then enjoyed an awful flight that thankfully landed in Tripani on time and was made less awful by having a seat next to Anna. Our Air-BnB host picked us up from the airport and drove us to the property we would stay one-night each way in. It was in that ride I got my first real experience of using google to translate conversations in real time, something that would clue me into the low usage cases of LLMs a decade later when Samsung would try and promote it during the Paris Olympics via a feature/benefit that had been around for so long.
Summer was in bloom, and Anna and I walked the streets of Trapani that night, and picked a restaurant where Anna ordered Pasta Alla Norma, and I ordered something unmemorable. The Pasta Alla Norma would haunt my sister in the best of ways, like Mark from Peepshow taking cocaine. Where my sister is a seasoned traveller it is in the knowledge that window's of opportunity are small for the vagabond, and if you have to eat a dish for breakfast lunch and dinner to compensate for a life of lacking, then that's what you do.
We retired to our nautically decorated Air BnB, one I would describe as "Tier-2" being that we had a place to ourselves, with "Tier-3" being the Air BnB that came to haunt Europe...of turning housing into hostel's with worse security, where you book a room, and then you share the place with a host of other transitional strangers including a bathroom, all trying to do their best impression of Victorian ghosts and pretending the other guests aren't there. I was lucky both in Zena and GDL to find Air BnB's that are "Tier-1" which was the original dream of Air BnB, where you rent out the guest room in a local's home, and have something akin to the adult-exchange-student experience.
Anyway, in the morning we had time to check out Trapani, my sister hoping to have time before our ferry departure to maybe get some more Pasta alla Norma in.
Trapani remains, really my only experience of Southern Italy, something that more recently I've been reflecting on as a lasting yearning especially after binge watching Gamorra La Serie (set in the Scampia neighbourhood of Napoli) and Cold Summer ("Il Metodo Fenoglio" set in the city of Bari, 1991) where though in my Italophilic heart I am Zenese, my eyes long to see and understand the Mezzogiorno.
We walked the boundaries of the port-come-peninsula, with some stone fortifications that kept southerly(?) winds out of Trapani's historic centre, out to the ports where my sister observed the first Italian man she regarded as 'a bit of alright' a stark contrast in our experiences of Italy, where I was overwhelmed almost to the point of being inured to the experience of turning a corner and meeting the most beautiful woman of my life. Or standing still and having the most beautiful woman of my life pass by. Or catching a bus and sitting opposite the most beautiful woman of my life. Or buying a pair of socks and having to interact with the most beautiful woman of my life. etc.
I have elsewhere to write about that. And have.
We walked out past various fish vendors until there was nothing but the Torre di Ligny between us and the sea, but didn't go in or investigate, then walked back, probably looked for Norma, grabbed our bags and went to board our ferry. There was another couple there waiting in confusion with us as we inquired of a ferry that arrived and departed until some port authority eventually informed us that our ferry wouldn't run today because there was "waves".
Unimpressed by the lack of robustness, this left us stranded, far from our next nights of accomodation, without an automatic refund of our ferry, no visible recourse and no wifi because we were standing beside the sea. We found some cafe where we could buy some drinks and get a wifi password, then did that hasty scrambling thing until we found a way to buy last minute tickets for some seats on the mail plane to Pantellaria that would get us to our accomodation on time.
We bit the bullet and bought the additional airfares, managed to get a taxi or uber or something to the airport and got away. The couple that were also waiting for the ferry had found the exact same recourse.
On the flight to the island, a local girl overheard Anna and I talking and we got talking and it turned out she was coming back to the island from University summer holidays in Canada to visit her family. My sister explained that she had found out about Pantellaria from the Tilda Swinton movie "A Bigger Splash" and liked the look of it, much like I had previously in my life visited Mumbai, India because of the book Shantaram. I asked for her number and she gave it, doing my thing where I establish vague expectations in women where they feel ambivalently creeped out and excited, I assume, one of those sour-grapes-if-you-do-sweet-lemons-if-you-don't type exchanges caused by asking for a woman's number in front of her mother and my sister. What was going on? I had an Italian sim card and credit, Anna did not.
You may have already deduced Pantellaria is not the easiest place in the world to get to. It is not exactly convenient, even for Italians or for that matter Sicillians or Tunisians. The next incident would be the "bitter" in any attempt to pigeonhole our trip as "bittersweet".
At the airport my sister went to arrange a rental-car. I forget how it would have worked if the sea had been smooth as glass as the ferry seemed to require, but Anna was able to obtain the keys to a nice little black hatchback of now long forgotten make and model. The couple who had made both the same travel arrangements as we had, and were Italian now departed from us by renting a Vespa like thing.
Because we'd had to forkover an extra hundo or something each to buy the plane tickets, we were both feeling snug with a buck when it came time to rent a car. As such, perhaps sensing my sisters hesitation, a guy on the desk opined that the insurance probably wasn't worth it, because for most damages to the car the premium would be more than cost. My sister took the advice and it seemed to make sense to me.
Only after keys had been exchanged for cash, did my sister realize her travel insurance covered any insurance premiums, but she had to buy insurance for rental cars. We followed someone, probably the same guy, to our Air BnB where we were met by a nice elderly couple that showed us around the lovely house and how to lock up and my sister and I observed Crucifixes and photos of the pope in every room, perhaps something that had lead to Pantellaria's decline in population that now left a whole house as affordable accomodation for us.
I forget how it was partitioned, but it must have been because we were introduced to a young attractive Italian couple by our hosts that were eating takeaway pizza on the patio and I think we asked for dinner suggestions before concluding that we were too tired, it was too dark and the roads around the island were too narrow for us to be bothered going anywhere.
I got a text response from the woman on the plane with a bunch of suggestions as to what to do and where to eat during our brief stay on the island. I thanked her, and we took, mostly the eating suggestions and also where to best view sunset from.
Driving around the island was a nightmare, and the brunt of that nightmare was born mostly by my sister. Being 9 years ago now, I feel like the first thing we did was circumnavigate the islands outer coastal road. It's not quite one of those Peruvian Andes roads, but it is like one lane and a half, and it isn't one way, furthermore a massive water tanker seems to drive around the island constantly turning driving around Pantellaria into something more akin to Frogger.
There was a one-way street my sister and I managed to drive the wrong way up, getting quite harsh jeers from the locals. This aside though, it was more a so-far-so-good kind of vibe where we hiked up to Pantellaria's highest point on "Monte Grande" 836m above sea level. The dirt was full of ash I remember that because a large chunk of the island's tree line had recently burned, but I can't remember if I already had gone through the ordeal of sourcing Eurotrash white Ontisuka Tiger Slip on shoes.
Fortunately my sister took photos that are preserved across time and space. I actually have returned to Eurotrash white since, and really love how the white turns to dirty grey and fades over time as shoes turn into socks. But this is probably why the ashy dust on my feet was so memorable.
Things then began to fall apart. I can't remember the order of events. Likely the worst thing, happened fairly on, which was being pushed into a panic by the aforementioned fucking water tanker, we had to back off the road at some point where a big chunk of volcanic rock crunched up a nice panel beater and repaint bill on the rental car that we tried to convince ourselves wasn't too bad. We had at least one night of chasing a sunset that was really special when your world has shrunk to the size of Pantellaria, before having a meal with some pasta and seafood that lead my sister to muse upon how it was not as good as Pasta alla Norma, and nothing ever would be, ever again.
The next day we checked out Pantellaria town briefly, had gelati in brioche that turns out to be good thing + overrated thing = bad thing. Some aronchini before heading to Elephant rock, which really does look like an elephant above the water, and a beautiful little cove for swimming in.
Anna and I entered the water, clear as crystal, it was like fucking Neptune's reception hall. We splashed around, and I can remember even now the hypnotic allure of being submerged in the medium, the sudden urge to try and dive to the bottom. This was where I discovered that duck-diving is another range of motion I am no longer capable of doing without dislocating my shoulder.
I had to exit the water, somehow, have some exchange with the locals and improvise some sound effects to convey that I'd dislocated la spada. I got sat on my arse, then covered with towels until I was taken in an ambulance back to Pantellaria town and the hospital to have my shoulder reduced. My sister was able to drive behind the ambulance and hence probably had the lowest stress drive of her time on the island.
My conceit is, that if you wrote the meaning of life on the haft of a spear, I would impale myself to read it. I want to be clear that very much the point of this post, is that I am glad for the experience, though it resulted in a dislocated shoulder and an afternoon lost to recovering from anesthesia, (I was only billed for one of those immobilising slings, that after almost inducing a panic attack attempting to sleep in it, I returned and got refunded the next day.)
We visited somewhere else where making room for another car to pass, branches of some scrub further scratched the rental car quite horrendously. That was occassion for my sister to have a melt-down over the stress of driving in these tiny goat tracks in a pristine uninsured rental car, the unforeseen and unwanted expense of the bill that was anticipated and its impact on the savings Anna had lived like a miser in Sydney for years to accrue. I did my best to comfort her, telling her to keep all the refund from the cancelled ferry tickets, but I like her was quite underfunded for my whole "my life is going nowhere" 3-month trip to Zena.
And yet we are rich. We are middle-class Australian's privately educated, both of us having the immense privilege of going to University twice and choosing careers in the pursuit of happiness, not to amass some estate in an impossibly ever-upward act of social mobility like our parents that nintendo switches might trickle down to future generations, but wealthy by Southern Italian standards, wealthy by global standards, but wired up, biologically to react emotionally to the same subtle variations in changes in wellbeing as all other human beings.
Here were all the bitter tears that maybe, were the price of admission to Pantellaria, an amazing, but inconvenient place. Calm would reassert itself, though perhaps, I can't remember, and I can't really speak for my sister, but there was a constant unease at visiting the end of the Earth. I imagine it might be similar to summitting Mount Everest, where one may wish to stay there forever, to die there, but also anxious to get back down the mountain, where people don't die from the act of breathing. Then just replace "die" with incur additional rental car repair costs.
The day after dislocating my shoulder, we went to a Lake called "Mirror of Venus" A lake, in an island, in a sea, in the middle of the world, that the goddess who emerged fully formed from a shell to join the Olympic pantheon used as mirror.
It's the thing, rich people can put a pool in their property. But the kind of wealth to obtain and create what nature provides has not been achieved yet. How much to make the mirror of Venus? Billions. How much to locate it on an island that isn't visible from space? Hundreds of millions?
It is there and there alone. There are many wonders of the natural world, and many one can bathe in, swim in, lay back and stare not just into the sky but through it, beyond it, into the vastness of the universe and wonder what wondering minds attempt to stare back millenia beyond millenia of photons limiting them from any real connection, but that we are all connected across space and time. That life is there, and it is there's, and that if the Universe is infinite, then that includes infinite myselves, who have infinite time to bask in the personal property of a goddess on holiday at the end of the world with their sister, in this moment that is just for them and nobody else.
You know, and I can't put it into words, but I remember it. We have it, you don't, and it was perfect for just relaxing about the whole being alive thing, to just be alive.
I think more so than anything else we did in Pantellaria, this was our place and our time that endures at least for me. Those money problems it induced were survived, and the cycle of windfalls, tax returns, bills, rip-offs etc. continue for us all. The experience endures though, and though I contemplate my love of the city of Zena herself far more, and the metaphysics of truly loving a city somewhat endlessly living rent free next to losses I can't process, terriers that are grafted onto my joy-receptors proving that neurons that fire-together, wire-together indeed. Pantellaria is like an island in my memory that is Anna and mine.
The return ferry was also cancelled due to waves, and one wonders when a ferry will be invented that can operate under conditions of waves, but we pretty much suspected that the ferry never does actually run and were well and truly ready to take the mail plane back to vaster island of Sicily. Plus Pasta alla Norma awaited Anna, though I cannot recall if she was able to get it again. I know she naively hoped it could be found in Zena, though I'm sure I tried to explain that I had had to quickly learn that actually there is no Italian cuisine, that only exists outside of Italy where you can get Bolognese and Carbonara in the same restaurant, let alone state.
Zena was safe, I was entrenched, by the time Anna returned to her for another over night before she packed off to Zurich to fly home. Fabrizio my Air BnB housemate for the 90 days, was happy for Anna to stay on the couch rather than Hostel it, Anna got to see me as I lived there, walking daily 12-16km return, though I couldn't and never could, convey to her the totality of my picture of Zena.
And at that point in time I'd had 6 weeks, or two months, tops, in Zena, it would end being 90 days give or take a day trip to Milan, another to Cinque Terra, 3 days in Barcelona and arriving and leaving via Zurich. My sister returned once, transiting through and sending me a photo some years later. I have not, and in some sense must, but in any real appreciation of the nature of life, need not because I have hanged drawn and quartered myself by putting roots down in Ballarat, Melbourne, Nagoya, Zena and of course, GDL over the course of my life.
It is my ambition to return to them all, somehow. To live in all my homelands, somehow. The how isn't known, apart from a vague understanding that it will take money, and will take money away from this, for that. Pantellaria though, we have. I doubt either of us will return unless we find ourselves chatting one day and concurring we'd like a second shot at it. Maybe in another lifetime, in the jail-term sense, 25 years from now we'll decide to fuck off and hire bicycles next time.
Do I recommend Pantellaria? I find the question, posed to myself, unintelligible. You know it feels like the kind of special place where one could die on vacation, and confused and distraught relatives fly out to ID the body and get it released for repatriation before or after cremation, and they have a still moment on the island and are like "No, I get it. This is a good place to die." and they wind up scattering your ashes into the Mediterranean. I mean this as high praise of a spectacular place.
It is not the same spectacular as Cinque Terra, go there. I care not. It (Pantellaria) may actually be akin more to Zena, La Superba's great and far more famous rival Venice, La Serenissima, in that some people actually avoid Venice because of all the tourists, and it is somewhat overrun with tourists, but all those sweaty, fat, obnoxious and disoriented tourists cannot conceal the fact that Venice is other-wordly in its beauty. It makes Amsterdam look like Horsham. It makes Chicago look like Los Angeles. It makes Kyoto look like Bendigo, Tokyo like Beijing, and Beijing look like Beijing.
Pantellaria with its intimidating one-lane two-way roads hemmed in by abrasive volcanic stone fences and dislocated shoulders, remains an amazing place that I'm glad my sister dragged me from the warm embrace of Zena through two airports to share with her, though it literally broke us, we are a fragile people made for breaking, it is what we do and keep doing.
This is a post in response to a kind of mental chafing, where a thought gets lodged in my brain and gets me irritated, so I'm purging it here.
I've never had no money, I've never struggled so much financially that I've failed to donate to the wikimedia foundation. Wikipedia is so fucking great.
I also remember how it was treated:
'Tis but a sketch, from Collegehumor no-less, published some time in 2009-10. But this was a popular meme that went around when Wikipedia emerged as one of the internet's most visited sites.
In some ways, when wikipedia was a story, it was just archetypal. Like it's essentially the same thing as this low-rent Conan sketch about Google's attempt at a self-driving car. Similarly, I can recall going to Sustainability events around the same time, and people would talk about creating a global wiki-government through grassroots citizen participation to address climate-change and other utopian optimism much like some people talk about "AI" now curing cancer and solving climate change etc now.
What was different though, and what is so irritating, is that people disparaged wikipedia as unreliable, and wikipedia was great and cheap and free and ad-free, and while just about every other contemporary platform has gotten worse from Google-search to Amazon to Facebook etc. Wikipedia remains terrific.
ChatGPT puts wikipedia, and reddit and newsmedia and whatever else into a blender, then uses an incredible amount of resources, something like 10x or 100x the energy of doing a google search and then just clicking on the wikipedia link. Gemini produces for you, a worse and less reliable result than the wikipedia article, and yet...
For me a literally unfathomable amount of money has been poured into promoting just this application of generative LLMs. That's the big difference, using a little hyperbole license, it's fairish to say nobody invested in wikipedia in any financial sense. A community produced a social good, which was great because it updates constantly, but is also checked constantly to enforce community standards. ChatGPT 4.whatever now has a crappy little message at the bottom to disclaim that the content may not be acurate. If you go to a wikipedia page on a subject that few people are interested in, there will be a big box up the top warning you that the article has numerous problems with it. Claims will be followed by "[citation needed]" there's a talk page where you can see conspiracy fiction fans demanding answers as to why the subject of a page has to be introduced as a "pseudo-scientist" and "conspiracy theorist".
I can only speak for myself, but my direct experience of the ease of adoption of Wikipedia into my life vs. the friction it was given by the media and contrasting that to the continual attempts to force me to adopt "AI" features from companies burning money to try and fuel this revolution and with literally pretty much every business exec in the world desperate to believe it will soon help them reduce headcount and hyperscale their output.
It's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous time to be alive. I don't think generative LLMs have no use cases, I don't think it will, nor needs to be "uninvented". I think the returns on investment just aren't there and it vies with Private Credit as a herald of the next GFC-like market collapse when we have enough data now, that we are really just waiting for silicon valley to admit the "AI revolution" is just the latest in a 12~13 year series of dud investments, but now interest rates aren't 0% they need returns.
Hail to Wikipedia. The Queen ain't dead yet, the rest of the internet just about is though.
Relax, this will have nothing to do with genocide or eugenics I promise.
A Salute to the Ordinary
Congratulations, you are an ordinary, or modal (most frequently occuring) person. One of them at least, of the many many ways to be modal, you like me, are probably most. Neglected by "The Great Man" theory of history, "successologist" podcast hosts, but celebrated by brutal dictators and wannabe totalitarians as a pretext for crushing their "elite" political rivals and the subject of "slice of life" comics, indie movies and zines where ordinary people learn to grow by leading ordinary lives, gathering the necessary personal growth to successful get a life, largely not worth paying attention to, back on track.
This is a pleb:
Distributing Bread to the Plebians By Marie-Lan Nguyen (2011), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16958883
These are ordinary people, trying to live fulfilling and largely unassuming lives. They probably had dreams, dreams of a bread buffet or something, and maybe an entirely paved or cobbled road to walk to their field on so they didn't get flecks of mud sticking to their calves.
Good decent folk, not the great men and women of history, but the modal people whose collective economy likely defined the course of history more so than the decisions of leadership, but both equally being largely products of their environments.
And in the spirit of inclusivity, although in some broad sense members of the LBGTQIA+ community could never be called modal, along with people in the disability space; with respect to the singular dimension of honesty, minorities too are likely to have this in common with the mode.
Most people are pretty honest. Not necessarily informed or competent, but honest. Decent. If they say they will do something, we can pretty safely assume they reasonably expected themselves to do it, and failures to do so can mostly be attributed to a failure in competence of either the situational analysis or communication. (Like when they would do the dishes.)
I'm going to examine now, but one problem - and let me be deliberate with my wording - we face in the emergent property of society. That is one of dishonesty.
I'm going to start tossing out some premises.
Premise 1: Most people are mostly honest.
Size equals relative population
There appears to be some research that supports this, though how cross-cultural it is I don't know. It is consistent with Pareto distributions though where we can expect something like 15% of the lies are told by 85% of the population. This premise of course implies a second premise.
Premise 2: A few people lie a lot.
This then would be the roughly 15% of the people, who tell about 85% of the lies. (the little red guy in the image above)
Hopefully so far, not only are their studies to kind of suggest these premises hold up to empirical observation, but with the high likelihood that you are in many ways a modal person, with an unassuming life, it also conforms to your experience - that most people are basically honest, and a few people stand out for being unusually deceptive, in a way that isn't just fraught, but also kind of weird.
Their being two-faced is noteworthy to you, know what I'm saying. You see them behave dishonestly, and it leaves you with a kind of greasy remorse for a while, wondering if you should have said or done something.
Premise 3: Projection is a very common psychological phenomena.
Now, I'm an odd duck that is of the opinion that when most people talk about 'empathy' they are most likely referring to 'projection' and that this premise is not to suggest most people lie about their empathic ability, but rather most people don't think too much about empathy or projection, would not know what empathy feels like as distinct from what projection feels like; and routinely confuse the two just through sheer incompetence.
No the relevance is, that if you are basically honest, you are also likely to project that honesty onto others. This would result in behaviour like taking people at their word. A behaviour that is adaptive, because most people are honest, and so they basically say what they do for most ordinary claims. So they say they'll brush their teeth, then they brush their teeth. There's no need, or at least no benefit, to scrutinizing if they do indeed do what they say.
In the above image, the "big guy" is projecting their own blue honesty onto others, for the most part (4 of the little guys) this projection is as good as empathy, they are projecting honest behaviour onto people who behave honestly, but the one little red guy also has honesty projected onto him. This likely is the what is happening when we come across someone who doesn't just lie chronically, but also isn't even very good at lying, and once we wise up and ask "how do they get away with it?" it is likely because most people don't even look for deceptive behaviour.
But the same is true of liars, they also project, and as a result they tend to not take people at their word which in their case, has little benefit, it is mostly cost as they scrutinize the actions of people, too ready to jump on the slightest deviation from their stated claims, but most of this time and energy is wasted.
In this shitty image, from the perspective of the big red guy, the liar, dude projects his own deceptiveness onto both the honest majority, and his fellow lying minority. This somewhat protects him from other's deception, but may also explain rationalizations from manipulative people like "everyone does it, don't be so naive." 'n' shit.
Premise 4: Manipulators use rationalization as a psychological defense.
Straight from the last part of the last premise, someone who lies, needs to feel in some way okay with their behaviour of lying. There are many means by which to get there, but the one I shall focus on is a form of self-deception where those few liars, lie to themselves with the rationalization "everybody lies" you know, the motto of Dr House M.D. who was himself a chronic liar to facilitate his abuse of pain medication. He even lies in one season about having brain cancer in order to get a cool drug injected directly into his brain.
There is likely to be other determinants to this premise - like selection bias, confirmation bias and survivorship bias. Basically, the liar justifies this self serving world view of seeing liars everywhere in order to justify their own deception as tit-for-tat, by ignoring the abundant data suggesting that people are basically honest and decent.
Indeed, since the truth tends to out, they likely naturally migrate into silos we might describe as "cesspools" where their estimation "everybody lies" comes to ring true, though should be properly read as "everybody I associate with lies."
Conclusion: That's How Plebs get Got.
They project basic decency onto predators, who due to their low numbers can sustain extracting large prices for this naivete - in the form of scams that ruin their marks financially and what not, or setting them up to take the fall for the cumulative damages of their persistent lying.
If you think about, for example, how many people hold jobs for a number of years. Their jobs wind up having little resemblance to their position descriptions for which they were hired, and their job titles. Much of the arrangement they depend on to house, feed and clothe themselves are informal. They don't consult lawyers or get advice, they are given a great deal of autonomy etc.
These situations arise, because most people are ordinary, ordinary and decent. The sheer abundance of ordinary decent people, mean in most cases a police state is too costly, so bad actors can often just walk right in, unquestioned.
I'll go out on a limb, and assert that most of what we do is informal. For example, my immigration status is rarely checked, if ever. Even when I've been an illegal immigrant. My tertiary qualifications can be obtained with 50% passing grades, so which half of my qualification do I know? Then apply the half life of knowledge, and we are looking at a situation where most of most working professional's education and training comes informally from learning on the job etc.
Now, the above is likely an unsound and invalid soliloquy, let's get to the problem of the small folk in respect to deception.
First Problem - There's Good Information, but it's Useless
An ordinary person, can be well equipped to spot lies, flattery and bullshit and know what appropriate course of action to take, with excellent resources we already have and have had for a long time.
We have Josef Pieper's "Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power" an essay, really, an ordinary person could read it in an afternoon, and of particular note and worth, is Pieper's take on flattery, psuedo-reality, manipulation and the costs it imposes.
Then there is "On Bullshit" the 1985 essay still holds up. With a particularly valuable contribution to the subject by pointing out the difference between a lie, and bullshit. The difference between lying to someone, and bullshitting someone.
Then there is Sam Harris' booklet, on lying, where he attempts to reproduce the value he got, from a single philosophy subject and where he argues about how lying pretty much never produces the best outcome. Even in extremis, where a lie might save someone's life, he points out that this merely kicks the can up the road, and the life-threatener will have to be dealt with, at some point, by someone. He extends it to lying about medical diagnoses, and about lying to kids about Santa.
But these all reek of solutions, not a problem, so what is the first problem? Well it's some combination of the fact that most ordinary people, just aren't going to read that shit, they don't see it as an investment of time when there is me-time - self soothing through consumption and diversion. There are urgent things to do, and there are incentivised things to do like school and work. But even if we leveraged institutions like school and work to make learning about lying mandatory through simple and accessible texts like the three I've mentioned, people wouldn't apply these learnings, in the same way that telling people hamburgers and soft-drinks aren't good for them, nor dignified, they know it, it doesn't stop them. I can't stop.
People don't get exposed to information, update their beliefs and translate that into action with anywhere near the efficiency a naive belief in strong-media effects assumes. And ordinary people in my experience tend to massively overestimate the effects of media, confusing their feeling bad because they don't conform to beauty or other esteem ideals, with the world where such effects were powerful where they would feel worse relentlessly pursuing those ideals because the media effected them so.
The number of people who really descend into body dysmorphia because of media, I suspect would in the wash, turn out to be similar in proportion to the number of people who improve their lives in some way, by putting into effect good advice they read in a book: as in like 1~2% of the population who change up their habits without an imposition by the external environment. It's just one group is acting on bad media, the other on good media.
Second Problem - The Machiavelli Constraint
The Prince may be, one of the most valuable books still in print. People don't read "Mein Kampf" so the closest we have is "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli.
However, I can't claim and wouldn't assert that "The Prince" is misunderstood. I'm not sure if it can be understood. The author's intent appears to be the loser Machiavelli a deposed and exiled statesman making a sales pitch to Lorenzo di Medici to say he'd make a really good consultant and can he please come back from the countryside now.
Centuries later, this brown-nosing letter purporting to be expert advice from a statesman to the statesman that defeated and deposed him, is considered mandatory reading for Europe's ruling elite. A youngish "Old Fritz" being Prince Frederick II of Prussia, an awesome homosexual, writes a pamphlet critiquing "The Prince" from the perspective of an actual statesman, who will go on to be more successful at running a state than either Niccolo Machiavelli or Lorenzo di Medici. His buddy, Voltaire, decides to publish this pamphlet as "Antimachiavelli" and it makes a valuable text even more valuable, by pointing out how stupid some of Niccolo's suggestions are, and rejecting the overall thesis that it is in anyway necessary to be an asshole.
Leaving us with a text that I still think is valuable.
What I feel is most valuable, is that Machiavelli is doing some of the earliest work that will later be expanded upon by Bonhoeffer and Cipolla - he is whether he intends it or not, saying, look assholes exist, we cannot operate a state successfully that doesn't take into account assholes.
Poo-poo Alain de Botton's School of Life all you like and its $75 calming candle merch, his video "Machiavelli's Advice for Nice Guys" is the best approach in terms of extracting value from The Prince. Basically it is saying "when they go low, don't go high." I've read the Prince a bunch of times, there's no explicit advice that can be interpreted as "when they go low, you go lower" it is rather most explicit in "keep an eye on all these shenanigans."
Now the bind for nice guys, and modal people, when it comes to deception, is to go looking for evidence of deception, is likely to show up the same in your behaviour as deceptive people's projection of deceptiveness onto the population as large.
You will come across as untrusting, and this in turn, is behaviour from which you and others may infer, that you are unlikely to be trustworthy.
Unforch, this is one of those situations that I think is like insurance.
Insurance Companies
Insurance companies are pretty solid businesses. They tend to be profitable. They are profitable because they are charging more in premiums than they pay out in claims. They figure the chance of you being hung, drawn and quartered is pretty low, so for $1000 a month they will insure you against the event of being hanged drawn and quartered for $10,000,000.
They do the same with the chances of you being stuck in an MRI machine in the US, or having your home and contents burn down. Most people, never experience their house burning to the ground in their lifetimes (apologies California, but it's not like you can get insurance anymore...) but they pay home and contents insurance.
Why? Well because having your house burn down or being rushed to a US hospital can ruin you for life. Wipe you out in one hit, game over man, game over. You dead as Bill Paxton.
I'm asserting this is the same situation ordinary people face with deceptive people - their lies can wipe you out in one hit. So you just have to maintain all the costs on an ongoing basis to mitigate that threat. This is reading contracts, not signing them before you have asked yourself if you should run them by a lawyer, insisting that suss directions be communicated in writing, documenting who said what and who is to do what by when.
Basically, investing in making life as costly and difficult as possible for liars to operate in. Because if their lies get them in trouble, they will tell another to make their trouble, your trouble. Aka scapegoating.
So that's the rub, that's the bind, but the bigger picture is - ordinary modal people have virtually no chance. This is just one thing, and I don't fancy the chances of say, this post going viral, most people reading up on some accessible and insightful texts on lying, and migrating their cognitive behaviour from "that's weird, something doesn't feel right" to "nope, unacceptable. Let's not see where this goes."
All of this is unlikely and it is comparative chicken feed to the problems ordinary people face as a result of their economic literacy.
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