What Could Be Wrong With Me Party 2: Plutophobia

It's a downtown food court, not exactly a classy establishment. The world over they are similar to the point of being identical. The dining area is large and expansive. There are no real barriers to entry, and I seek these spaces out. I prefer to eat in a food court off of trays, than a restaurant with cloth napkins. 

Yet, I'm annoyed, irritated and bemoaning the state of society and the prospects of a future of humanity. I'm annoyed by people who eat and then abandon their food refuse, the chicken bones, the molested napkins, the stray rice grains and the trays, the trays that make it all so easily transferable to a bin.

My objection is not based on hygiene, not a physiological one. I will eat food I drop on the food court ground. I would eat the food served at a food court, putting it inside my body.

It's the attitude, the self same as the people on economy-class flights that immediately recline their chairs as far as they can go, and that stewards have to tell to put in the upright position for take off, until they do and then as soon as the steward is gone they recline their chairs again.

A fantasy of money, a shitty fantasy of money. In the food court I sense acutely the abyss of the nouveau riche. People who even in a food court can adopt the posture of "I've made it" if only for a moment, where its okay for somebody to clean up your shit, as though you are an infant.

And to a degree, growing up in Australia, all there is to be encountered are the nouveau riche. I could not say with confidence that I've ever come across old money. But it is the rich part I find gross.

The Skunking of Phobia (or concept creep)

In the overlap period of the 20th and 21st century, at least post-civil rights movement in the United States; phobia has referred to two, I feel, sufficiently distinct things.

Something like arachnophobia or acrophobia we are talking about a debilitating irrational fear. Like someone who is truly afraid of spiders can't get near them, even the common house spider species. Someone who dislikes spiders and doesn't feel like humanely relocating them with a glass and a piece of paper to somewhere out of the way like the garden, but slips off a shoe to pulverize them, I assert we generally wouldn't call arachnophobic.

Nor with acrophobia are we talking about someone whose heart races at the thought of a chute not opening on their first ever sky dive from a few kilometres above the earth's surface, but somebody who has a nervous breakdown on the 2m diving board they psyched themselves into giving a go at the local pool and has to be somewhat forcibly removed from the hand rails by a lifeguard because they cannot jump off nor descend the steps they climbed.

These I'll call traditional phobias, where people experience disproportionate trauma (another skunked term, but I mean fear for their life) in response to a largely unlethal stimulus like a wide open space, or holes - like in a crumpet.

Then there's the more political phobias, perhaps most notably homophobia, transphobia and Islamophobia. I'm going to hazard a guess that it's very very rare for a small child to be diagnosed by a medical professional with any of these phobias. While I'll not suggest that the behaviour and people they do describe are not characterised fundamentally by fear, it is clearly a much more empowered fear that generally doesn't result in screaming, running, cowering, tears, foetal positions etc. but aggression, assertion, marginalisation, violence, annexation of property, exclusion, discrimination.

Plutophobia could plausibly be either sense of phobia, but regarding me, it is much more the latter, a prejudice and as my opening example of people who don't bin their own foodcourt filth hopefully demonstrates, for me wealth is an attitudinal disposition I dislike more so than a literal, kind of tall Poppy equation where Bert has $100,000 in net worth and Ernie has $1,000,000 in net worth so I hate Ernie 10x as much as I hate Bert.

No, it is entirely possible to be wealthy and for me to like you personally fine, I make a generalisation and I recognise the challenge in many cases; of attaining wealth and staying grounded in some kind of modal reality.

The Out Loud Maths

There's an icecream store, a crappy one, offering Chocolate, Strawberry, Vanilla and Tutti Frutti.

Now, I gotta draw up like a table, and you don't have to give me a minute because it's already written.

Arundhati Roy, Toni Morrison, Noam Chomsky, Cassie Ventura, Sophia Boutella, Some Male Dreamboat yet to go nuts a la Pre-Marty Supreme Timothy Chalomet, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, BTK, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson all like Chocolate.

Roy, Morrison, Mussolini and Marilyn Manson like Vanilla.

Chomsky, Cassie, Male Dreamboat of the Moment, Hitler, BTK , SoS and Charles Manson like Strawberry.

Sophia Boutella likes Tutti Frutti.

Now, to explain plutophobia, we just substitute Chocolate for "Rich" the problem is that everyone likes being rich, "Vanilla" might be "Oprah Winfrey's Bookclub", Strawberry might be "Nascar" and Tutti Frutti might be "A concise history of premodern bowling games"

Imagining in this metaphor, that this ice cream shop has one of those soviet-hangover style operations filled with makework where you order your scoop flavour from one employee who gives you a ticket to take to a cashier to pay for your ice cream in return for another ticket that sends you to a holding pen where you have to hang out waiting in the company of people who picked the same flavour as you.

Because almost everyone likes chocolate, it's not that it's bad to potentially hang with Arundhati Roy, Epstein friend Noam Chomsky, Cassie Ventura or Sophia Boutella. It's just that it would be terrible to find yourself stuck in a pen with dicks like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, BTK, Son of Sam, Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson.

This for me is the mathematics of plutophobia, the problem is, for every person who seeks riches as validation of the struggle they've been through to contribute genuine value to society, they are typically outnumbered by people who just want some kind of validation of their narcissism. They just want to be rich because they like status and consumption and hedonism.

Now anywhere there's a rich scene, like elite private schools, exclusive clubs, restaurants with dress codes for their customers, vinyards, waterfronts etc. hanging around makes it merely a matter of time before dicks show up.

Somewhat in the reverse of addiction, where dopamine or endorphins or whatever spike to their peak in anctipation of the high, something Gabor Mate articulated as "it's not the having it's the getting" for me the anticipation is the bottoming out of my experience of plutophobia. My gut sinks in the Uber to pretentious district, I get angry at the destination wedding invite, I stew in transit to the resort. 

The Simple Silent Maths 101

I promise this post will explore how my aversion to wealth is debilitating and doesn't exist to justify it. That said I am compelled to do some apologetics for how I see the world:

Put simply, holding all else equal if I am not impressed by you without a million dollars, I am not impressed by you with a million dollars.

I struggle to think of a simple real world example, but imagine you met a guy for the first time in a crowded room, you shook hands and leaned in close to hear him speak his name.

"Gus."

"Nice to meet you Gus. I'm sorry but your breath makes my eyes water, it is just about the foulest thing I've ever smelled. What's the story there?"

"Oh that! Well I eat my own faecal matter."

Here you can see my struggle to think of a simple example, because in a way, the ability to eat your own shit is kind of impressive. Not attractive, but impressive.

"I mean is that like a paraphilia? Have you always done that?"

"Yes and no, these days I mostly do it for my only fans account, I can bring in 2~3k per shit I eat."

With this vulgar example, I hope I can point to a largely unconscious but widely acknowledged truth - that wealth is but a proxy for value. 

When I was in University the first time, it coincided with a mining boom in the Australian economy because it was the pre-Xi double digit GDP growth for China. It was briefly possible for someone to earn six-figure salaries operating a laundry service for a mining barracks, not even going down in the mines and extracting iron-ore. In the meantime, medical students lived in relative poverty undergoing the 6 years of schooling required to become an MD. 

I don't know, and I suspect that the data would bare out my experience, that almost no medical students dropped out of medical school in order to cash in on a mining boom. There's a general recognition that in the long run Doctors get to wear white coats, people come to them begging for help, they get good stable salaries. They may wind up working similar hours to the fly-in-fly-out miner but people are capable of comparing apples and oranges in this case. They understand that earning 6 figures as a miner is significantly different to earning 6 figures as a doctor.

What Do I Mean "Rich"?

Above I touched upon a foundation of my phobia, which is that we live in a very confusing economy. 

So for me I think I am specifically talking about "consumption" when I talk about "rich" or "wealth"

My sense, and perhaps anxiety being that most people, the modal person, might describe someone as "successful" when in fact they are simply talking about somebody who is able to consume, perhaps overconsume goods and services.

Netflix among its many true crime documentary series, had one dedicated to a catfisher that exploited this very notion of rich. A woman met him on a dating app, then he'd take them to a Michelin starred restaurant and pay for everything, take them on an international holiday to stay in luxury resorts in a chartered jet etc. They would date this guy for weeks or months seeing him as clearly solvent and flush, before he'd tell them he needed some bridging loan for an investment deal that might fall through or whatever.

As it transpired, all the proof of wealth he had demonstrated was financed by the last catfishing victim, their stolen money was used to convince the next woman that the conman had plenty of money of his own, but actually he had no income beyond the stolen savings of credulous women.

Many "rich" people, are not successful, nor do they do anything of value. These are heterodox opinions, but I appeal to open secrets, like that the stockmarket is now almost pure arbitrage and hardly functions as a capital raising institution, that many big companies are entirely dependent on corporate welfare for survival either directly sticking their hand out to the government and coughing 'ahem' or via venture capital that up until post covid interest rate rises, were able to borrow money at 0 or negative rates and bet on pretty much anything and if it hit good but if it came up snake eyes could then be transferred to a tax write-off indirectly affecting government welfare. That many highly paid executives can receive greater compensation for destroying a company and getting fired than they do for competently performing their jobs, that most wealth is inherited and that social mobility is dropping as inequality grows etc. etc.

But I don't want to be simply conflated with a commie. For me, "richness" is a state of mind, a preference for consuming expensive things, it isn't about "earning" or "creating value" or "competence" or "success" as consuming expensive things can be entirely financed through debt. 

It is to cross the median threshold of overconsumption - you know, I can overconsume calories by shopping at the duopoly of supermarkets buying near-expired meat and store brand cans/bags of soup, but richness is where you can't just go to a local beach for your holiday, you need to fly to southeast Asia where local wages are low enough that you can enjoy a full compliment of butlers and maids, even on a meagre income, and you can't just lie on the beach and listen to the waves, you need a waiter to bring you cocktails.

Australia has terms like "cashed-up bogan" that are classist, and while pointing to a real phenomena as was seen in the various mining booms of the Australian economy in the early 21st century, it is my experience that people born into the upper 20% of household wealth are often only superficially different in their crass tastes and preferences. There's no merit in hiring a private consulting firm to set up your home theatre, and DIYing a home theatre from a big box store. People do not need a home theatre, these are luxuries not necessities.

So the rich I am bigoted against, are the people who centre luxury consumption in their lives, hedonism and generally employ a halo effect thinking that people who consume luxury are smarter, more attractive, more ethical and virtuous, wiser etc. I fucking hate people with this mindset and the environments they create.

Club Groucho

“I don't want to belong to any club that would accept me as one of its members.” ~ Groucho Marx' letter of resignation to The Friars Club.

Miki and I are the only customers in the restaurant now known as Mikayla, located on the Takamatsu waterfront near the lighthouse it's a classy joint, objectively beautiful serving European cuisine with cutlery and everything. Takamatsu is famous for Udon noodles, and like absolutely everywhere in Japan it's pretty much impossible to find bad food, you basically have to have someone's grandma homecook something they remember fondly eating the day after Hiroshima or Nagasaki were bombed.

Though somewhere in Nagoya I have a fond memory of eating a superb spaghetti marinara, generally I wouldn't recommend eating European cuisines in Japan unless you need the comfort food because you'll be there a while. But yeah, you are often better off buying a hot meal in cling wrap from a convenience store than sitting down to a plate of pasta or $60 pizza with cubes of potato on it.

I remember Miki's haircut at the time, that the seasons fashion she wore was shorts over stockings with calf high boots, I remember where we sat in the restaurant, the time of day, the colour of the menus and that there was seabream on it. The only part of the meal I remember was the dinner roll served on the side. I remember it because I picked it up with my hand and took a bite of it and Miki told me off.

I couldn't credit her with being serious, but she really got shitty with me when I did it again, at which point I believed. As it transpires, I would later learn from a podcast that it is considered proper etiquette in somewheres and somewhens that anything you put in your mouth should not come out of your mouth and I guess this extends to taking a bite out of something. I'd met US citizens/residents that were raised to cut up their food using the knife in their dominant hand, then put the knife down and switch the fork to the dominant hand to put the pre-cut pieces in their mouth. 

Miki's ire was not some extension of the Japanese culture-bound sense that it is good manners to slurp up your noodles making a loud noise to indicate the dish is tasty to the host. That you are supposed to rip a bite size piece of bread from the roll and pop it into your mouth, instead of biting off a bite size piece is actually the kind of western etiquette a culture like Australia doesn't bother to teach because it is clearly, old money bullshit in a culture where for at least a century, everyone had to master eating a meat pie without the contents dropping on their crotch.

But I was ruining Miki's experience. She'd brought me to this special joint, this classy place and I simply did not, and indeed cannot even while reminiscing appreciate the opportunity to be all classy-like.

My faux-pa pushed to the point of genuine ire allowed Miki to address me in a manner that activated my hippocampus to sear in the memory of failure. I had ruined christmas.

When I get self-righteous however, what a shitty place to take me. I regard such restaurants the same as concession stands in a stadium - price-gouging monopolists. It was quite special to walk out on a clear calm Autumn evening to the lighthouse with Miki, there's no need to eat at the kinds of restaurants that get established in these places. 

In fact I have no need to eat in fancy restaurants ever. There just seems to be a readily observable objective fact about fine dining - it is simply not worth the effort. 

I watched Fran Lebowitz intervewed recently and annoyingly people tend to ask her questions to prompt her to repeat her greatest hits of opinions, and she was talking about articles that claim to have found "the best restaurant in New York" or maybe it was "the world" and Fran claims that there's no such thing. I half expected her to say a New York hotdog from any vendor was the best restaurant in the world, but she made her point about subjectivity that whatever your favourite restaurant is, is the best restaurant in the world.

NNT points out that on Manhattan island the Wall Street bankers are not enjoying their truffle risottos anywhere near as much as the construction workers out the window are enjoying their ham and cheese sandwiches from the bodega, as the signals our brains experience tend to generate pleasure in proportion to the calories in vs the calories expended. 

Chris Rock asserted to Jerry Seinfeld in his appearance on 'Comedians in Cars getting Coffee' that a good meal is all about the company, that a two-piece feed with the right person is far better than a Michelin starred dinner with an asshole. 

In UK sitcom 'Peepshow' Jeremy takes Big Suze on a date and, in an effort to impress her consents to purchasing a 45BPS bottle of wine and in his distress is compelled to utter 'Now that is wine...I mean its not delicious like a hot-chocolate or coke but as far as wines go this is [mwah]'

Of course, the deficit in sensory experience can be adjusted into surplus by a psychological experience of consuming social status. 

This however, doesn't work if you are plutophobic like me. I get no thrill from 'special treats' from pretending to be king for a day, an hour or even fifteen minutes. But I also tend to think less of people who do, it puts me in mind of someone with a really reductive view of the world, like someone who thinks a boring number like 50 is more interesting than 49 because 50 is bigger.

The first haircut I got after returning from Mexico was an undercut, peaky blinders style. It became clear that until my hair sufficiently greased up to sit right, I would have to use some kind of grease in my hair. I couldn't find vaseline hair tonic in my local supermarket, and it was quite an effort to find a product so basic. I eventually found it in one of our pharmaceutical big-box stores for like $4 for 120ml or whatever. That was two years ago and I use it so sparingly that it only recently depleted the neck of the bottle so an air bubble is visible while the cap is on. It likely will still be mostly full when I die at roughly twice the age I am now.

My mum, bless her, noticed I'd bought this cheap petroleum derived hair grease and thought a good gift would be some luxury version of it featuring a bearded man logo stuck onto a little dark glass container. It's the thought that counts, and the thought I can acknowledge, but the gift was returned to the store. Cosmetics are a notorious domain for Veblan goods with some quirk of psychology allowing for a basic grift of extracting more money from reductive thinkers, who assume a higher price = superior quality = superior performance. 

In my last post of this series I mentioned that a symptom of my asynchronous cognitive development appears to be bringing far more context to situations than others do, who tend frequently to consider them in isolation, or some sample of a larger picture rather than the entirety of context available.

I was very grateful to receive an invitation to a friend's niece's quinceanera celebration. Largely because it was an aspect of Mexican culture I'd heard about, but felt unlikely to experience first hand. A lot of my personal makeup wound up clashing in a very personal way on that evening, so I'm sure I'll invoke this example again in further instalments, but my plutophobia was a quiet part of it.

Firstly, I do not wish to seem an ingrate, the celebration cost me nothing to attend as a 'plus one' partner of the host family's friend and I received a delicious free meal and was made to feel included and got to observe the aforementioned living culture of Mexico. 

But I was not the intended audience of many features of the celebration, indeed the stars misaligned in such a way that what I'm sure was a fabulous quinceanera was coincident with pretty much the worst party I could imagine. Unbelievably bad (for me) such that due to my lack of credulity owing to my cultural transplant, my partner and I had no contingency, she was blindsided completely by my response to it also.

In short, quinceanera's are a bit of a problematic cultural artefact - just as weddings are problematic in WEIRD nations like Australia, where the median wedding cost is 59% of an individual's median annual salary (38.5k/65k) the quinceanera can involve similar lavish social posturing with a party for a 15 year old girl costing over USD$10k in 2012. 

I have only been to the one celebration, and it was in Mexico hosted in a large field with easily 200+ guests, of which a clear minority were children. The food was a taco-bar that closed around 6 or 6.30 pm. The actual bar stayed open until 2am, there was a dance floor and a bandstand where about four full bands performed from 6 until 2 am. At one point fireworks were set off, causing a dog "Tuna" brought by some daft hippie to bolt, tarnishing for me an evening as good as Smither's introduction to the comedy stylings of Homer Simpson by announcing a "dog not unlike Lassie has been run over in the car park."

I was at that party for 13 hours. Some 3 or 4 hours longer than the friends who had kindly invited me. I actually would not learn until I saw a breakdown of Bad Bunny's 2026 Superbowl halftime show, that it is a Hispanic cultural norm to simply hang out at parties forever, and most children have a right of passage, depicted in the halftime show by a child using the football as pillow laying down on plastic outdoor furniture that Bad Bunny wakes up, to learn to endure these (from my cultural perspective) painfully long fiestas.

The length of the party is relevant to the bands hired, and the bar tab on the cocktails that ran all night long. As a teetotaller, the bar actually didn't have any non-alcoholic substances to offer me, the first and only time I ever came across this oversight. The family of the princess may have dropped collectively something like $10k USD on this celebration certainly something roughly equivalent to the Mexican median household income of USD$5k per year. 

Having that context in my mind, whatever the personal significance and triumph of a loving family celebrating a personal milestone, the event, the institution is just gross. A living symptom of gross wealth inequality that as Gary Stephens of Gary's Economics says "the future is looking like a lot of barbed wire security fences, and I don't want to see my kids on either side of that fence."

Adam Smith Smithed It From the Get-Go

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion which we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other original passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it. ~ Adam Smith, Opening paragraph of The Theory of Moral Sentiments/Part I (emphasis added by me)

I assert, and would not be the first nor the greatest to do so, that the delusion of our times is the "fuck you I got mine" attitude baked into our economic institutions. Adam Smith is not, as you can see from the above paragraph, the founder of modern economics. He was a philosopher working in a much vaster and more pluralistic social sciences. 

He is obliquely anti-Neoliberal, recognizing the necessity of trade-unions as a countermeasure to the constant conspiring of the asset owning classes to deprive workers of their fair share. Smith differentiated as our modern economic talking heads do not, between capital and rentiers, most Australian's for example would not even be able to tell me what a 'rentier' is and would likely guess it refers to a tenant. 

In "Prosperity Without Growth" by Ecological Economist Tim Jackson, the character of our orthodox economy is given as fuelled primarily by the emotion of anxiety, and terms have emerged like "the precariate" to describe the emergent class of people who are fundamentally economically insecure.

This is the noise in my head that makes it hard for me to address the bigotry of my plutophobia. As Smith asserted, too many other's happiness is necessary to me to enjoy my own, at least as far as dropping money on luxury goods and services is concerned.

Perhaps related to my asynchornious cognitive development, and again I often think of the Far Side comic with the cow that is the only one aware of her fate as a steak, I felt too aware in my private school education that my and every other cohort were deliberately being stressed to become more selfish with an emphasis placed on the literal cognitive distortion of all-or-nothing thinking. Being charitable and phrasing it thusly: my school as an institution did nothing to discourage a prevalant notion that if you didn't land in the top 20% of the state, your life was basically over.

Now I'm not unreasonable, I don't for example, forego the luxuries of food security and shelter because I'm acutely aware that among many others, there's people who do not have these things in Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, the Congo and Iran right now. I'm much more local in my thinking, because economies are massive institutions that tend to divide up along nation states. I can eat fried chicken without feeling too bad about Ukrainians fighting tyranny in their eastern provinces.

In my senior year of high school I was "elected"/designated* a house captain, all the student leaders of our cohort were treated to, like, a leadership training day, it involved some guest speakers of which I can only remember the guy from toastmasters, and a trust exercise where I got distracted and wound up clotheslining Bowen, and at the end of the day we got a feedback form to suggest how it might be improved for the next year. I expressed something to the effect of "I don't see why this program couldn't be delivered to everyone." 

I disliked being in an exclusive little club, and my mum, again bless her, had gone and had the shop stitch on the yellow and black striped band onto my school blazer pocket that indicated I had achieved the pinnacle of sporting achievement in lawn bowls by winning the district finals, without my consent, and "Henderson" wound up being embroided under the school crest on the pocket, again without my consent. Yeah it's great that my mum is proud and shit, but it was also kind of like signing me up to be in "club dickhead" and surrendering my entry privileges to "club based" like I wasn't happy, but I guess it's my own fault for participating in the well known lawn bowls scammola.

For, from my bigoted perspective, if there is any social good in lobster thermidor, its greatest good is as a lure with which all the reductive and rigid thinking dickwads can be ensnared and removed to a "luxury ghetto" where I know where they are and can be confident I don't have to deal with them.

Of course, I share the preferences of Chris Rock, I am delighted with a two-piece feed and do not need lobster, so I'm happy to sacrifice lobster if it means I can also herd the bad company out from the good. 

And certainly, there are people who are thoughtful, sensitive, erudite, worldly, natural, generous and interesting that have expensive tastes. My friend Ann for example, is pretty much the only person I've met so far whose company can sufficiently distract me from my bigotry when she takes me out to a fancy place. Most company though is not worth the emotional price of admission (I know I didn't pay for lunch at the Press Club.)

For me, I experience no joy, or even relief to get a seat on a life-raft as the Titanic is going down. Listening to a recent episode of "The Unbelievable Truth" on Youtube, one of the eponymous unbelievable truths in that radio program was that an analysis of survivor testimonies showed that while US male passengers were far more individualistic and thus willing to beg, borrow or steal their way onto a life boat, testimony from English survivors remarked that once their husbands has ensured they had a seat, they strolled to the back of the ship and politely smoked cigars and exchanged banter while they waited for the ship to sink.

Having not been tested, I cannot say in the moment whether I would be more US than Englishman, I know which one I identify with. But even that falls short, I would likely as a 1st or 2nd class passenger be unable to survive without crippling survivors guilt simply knowing that the lower class passengers were deprioritized. (Or what Adam Smith said, at the beginning of economics.)

Debilitation

I am not sure I could overcome my prejudice, the visceral dislike I have of being in proximity to "the finer things" to for example, take my best girl out to a fancy restaurant where I'd ask her to be my old lady. I would feel some cognitive dissonance, that I was asking someone to spend their life with me in the specific context of an activity among those I actively dislike.

I'd also urge you not to underestimate the debilitating effect I experience, of being someone 'hard to buy gifts for' I have myself complained that my mum is someone who just likes 'nice shit' and on that hand, for me my mum is someone I struggle to buy gifts for, when I can't see the point of a fine china plate or a 'lovely' writing pen. But many people who love and care about me have had to experience the expression on my face of utter alienation and disappointment and anguish as I have unwrapped some luxury good I don't want, never wanted and never will want as for me it is an intrinsically tainted thing, and then worst of all I have to see the heartbreak on their faces as they take in mine.

I have criticised the "Platinum Rule" as being inferior to both the Silver and Golden rule which goes "treat others as they wish to be treated" on the basis of recognizing that "mindreading" is a well founded cognitive distortion which the platinum rule demands on our part. But it is not a feat of mind reading when a friend or colleague attains some shiny bauble that means so much to them and so little to me, that because of my bigotry I do not have it in me to be happy or excited for them.

To me someone saying they landed their dream internship at one of "The Big n" whatever firms, puts me in mind of Larson's Far Side dog bragging to his neighbour "Ha ha biff, after we go to the drugstore and the post office I'm going to the vet's to get tutored..."

Friends that wanted to/went on to study medicine evoked mixed feelings in me. There were win/win win/lose and lose/lose outcomes, friends who wanted to be doctors out of a genuine love of their fellow man and wanting to help them at their worst, friends who wanted to be doctors for the prestige and material rewards that would incidentally make good doctors ...and friends who wanted to be doctors for the prestige and material rewards who appeared to have given little thought as to whether they should be doctorin' anyone.

In a curiosity of framing, if I am to write "people seek validation" it will come across as conceited and condescending on my part, reframe it as "people dislike feeling invalidated" and it seems to me at least a perfectly reasonable statement that needs-must say the exact same thing.

I am constantly invalidating the self-esteem people around me draw from a luxury consumption experience, which my plutophobia generally values at less-than-nothing.

Got 'til it's Gone

That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?
They paved paradise, put up a parking lot ~ Big Yellow Taxi, Jodi Mitchell

I don't dispute Jodi Mitchell's observations, nor would I dispute that Big Yellow Taxi wasn't still 100% relevant when Counting Crows covered it in 2002, nor would I oppose someone putting out yet another cover in 2026 on a major label.

I'm going to "Yes-and" Big Yellow Taxi and just iterate it out - they also demolish the parking lot, the pink hotel, the boutique and the formally swinging hot spot. No paradises to be sure, these anachronysms from the 70s, to make way for well Emporium which replaced Lonsdale House. 

A debilitating aspect of plutophobia, is that it is very much a minority form of bigotry, and an underappreciated aspect of bigotry is the preferred side of bigotry, because the excluded side of bigotry is so viscerally ugly. But most bigots and chauvinists often value things that are objectively valuable. It is for example, very commonplace to be enamoured with Japan, and it is undisputable that Japanese culture has a lot of truly wonderful things to offer.

There are far fewer people who are enamoured with shitty, dilapidated, anachronisms. Being that my preference attempts to conserve established value, it definitionally has to be debilitating under the economic paradigm the societies I live in is based around - GDP growth, or increasing consumption of novelties, my preferences render me a kind of undramatic uninteresting enemy of the state.

I first came across this concept in an Op-ed from an Australian journalist reflecting on the working class school he attended, and talking about how his school got demolished, and he explicitly said something to the effect of "poor people's experience an erasure of their history in a way that rich people don't."

While I did end up in a private school from years 8-12, I went to two public primary schools and did year 7 in a public secondary school. My first primary school was made I think literally of 'portables' or portable classrooms, prefabricated modular classrooms that could be unloaded off the back of a truck and bolted to the ground. My second primary school also had portables though more permanent buildings, only the portable classrooms I spent most of year 7 in (some clases were in brick buildings) remain to this day, but satellite imagery on google maps shows me how much of my childhood memories have been demolished.

Here is a quirk of history though, more of my childhood classrooms have likely been demolished than my parents' and not because they are richer, but because the cheap solution of portables was likely an 80s phenomena. 

But private schools are far more likely to have 'heritage' listed buildings that cannot be touched, the wealthy are more likely to live in houses that will not be demolished for development, and instead their children are likely to displace poorer children via auctions and gentrification and demolish or renovate working class homes of prior generations as part of the gentrification process.

I'm sure almost everyone has experienced something they like not being made anymore, but as a result of my plutophobia, this is basically my whole life.

I remember attending a Syn FM end of year dinner at former Lord Mayor's John So's restaurant, I think it was Dragon Boat on Lonsdale back in the day. It was early 2000s when China was experiencing massive economic growth basically because it was finally playing catch up, like Homer getting the same chair as Lenny and Carl from the Stonecutters, these were the annoying years when China was all like "Jealous?" and I was like "Well no, we already have KFC and cars and mobile phones and the internet and international flights and sufficient calories and shopping malls and big box stores" and China was all like "You're jealous" but China's new-rich children of party hacks with pent up demand for the good life hadn't yet transformed Chinatown in the Melbourne CBD. 

Chinese restaurants were mostly Hong Kong Cantonese style, decor was always the awful yellow, red and gold and the menus always were laminated and had a minimum of 60 dishes on them. That year, Syn FM had flown out one of Eminem's friends from that other band he had that released "purple pills" and "my band" as singles, to judge a rap battle competition of Melbourne MCs and two of the finalists did a performance at the Syn FM dinner. 

The performances were freestyle and I remember the MC that clearly won rapping "I ordered 48 they gave me beef and black bean."

These classic Cantonese restaurants were good, but they are going rapidly extinct in Melbourne. Mine was Nam Loong on Russell Street an institution that had been in place for as long as I can remember, and at least 30 years. I have memories of dining their with Chan, Claire and Miki, as well as friends like Shona, Yoshi, Karl and Andrew at least. It was my spot and last year it finally had to close its doors, simply because rents were too high.

Miki aksed me "you know what?" and I likely said something monosyllabic like "what?" and she answered "it's become my favorite" of Nam Loong. I pissed her off by deliberately contravening Japanese etiquette when she tried to pass me food and I tried to accept it with my chopsticks. At first I simply forgot you only do that at Japanese funerals, but once I realised I then started pointing at Miki with my chopsticks (which is very rude) and then stuck my chopsticks in her rice (which I think might be a death threat) much more egregious breeches of ettiquitte than taking bites out of my dinner roll instead of ripping it, and ettiquette from Miki's home culture too.

But you know, once she realised I was teasing her, it was a fun joke, in a Cantonese restaurant that became her favourite and where she deliberately overordered just to take leftovers home. Nam Loong is gone and Mikayla remains, even though one I can only recall as a horrible experience and the other a repository of fond memories.

It's debilitating as shit when you aren't excited by 'new better' things, because the old is actively destroyed constantly to make way for the new. Plutophobia is a very lonely bigotry to have.

The Simple Silent Maths 201

My parents are boomers, the lived through the post-war era and experienced incredible upward social mobility. Like most boomers, everything looked really great for them up until the end of the post-war period and the beginning of Neoliberalism, at least on paper.

My parents owned multiple properties, including our family home outright. My father was an executive for the town's largest employer and while my mother was a teacher, two-income households were not mandatory yet and she had bought her own house prior to meeting my father obtained with a mortgage that was less than 4x her annual salary as a primary school teacher. 

While neither of my parents stood to inherit significant wealth from their parents, they earned enough to play keep-up-with-the-Joneses. 

The silent maths comes in through a quirk of history, almost an accident. My mother was alive at the time where the white ethnic majority of Australia referred to as 'women entering the workforce' by which they meant the advent of two-income-professional middle class households, as poor women have always had to work largely as domestic servants. The options for women though were overwhelmingly teachers college or nursing school, and while my mum became a teacher, her friend became a nurse. That nurse married a specialist surgeon, where in the post-war era before women approached anywhere near parity in medical school enrolments, nurses married doctors and achieved social mobility that way, whereas the classes have reinstated themselves now with med students now marrying each other and nurses marrying tradies.

In the meantime, my dad got a job in the same regional city as my mum's friend married a surgeon, whether this was coincidence or design I've never bothered to find out. My parents then made the fatal psychological error of winding up being the poorest people in their social group, affording them the opportunity to constantly compare themselves to the extreme rather than the average.

I remember growing up with the impression that most kids lived in houses with a pool in it. I didn't care so much not being a huge fan of pools and having never lived in climates that really warranted them for all bar a couple of summer months, I just think, and I want to stress this is my impression that like couples in open relationships succeed in ways to experience rejection even having achieved a relationship, my parents had found a way to feel poor while being quite wealthy. 

We relocated to another town, and things improved a bit, but my parents still succeeded in finding wealthier people to compare themselves to.

They won't like this at all, but the silent maths happened, I noticed the degree of independence between being rich and quality of life. This has been present in me for a long time.

One of my parent's status anxiety manifested when I first started working full time. In getting their opinion on my first ever full time employment contract before I signed it, they discovered what I was earning. Even though they raised me to understand it was gauche to ever discuss money, (which it both is and is a useful fiction to keep the working class ignorant of just how unequal and unjust compensation often is) whenever I visited my parents, that parent would download without my interest, what everyone else's kids were earning. 

They also fortunately disclosed to me, that as they remained a signatory on the bank accounts I still used from childhood that they set up for me, they'd been ringing up and checking my balances every pay period. 

This anxious behaviour came to a head where I explained that I would always take higher job satisfaction over higher compensation (which remains true) and as such, I didn't really care about what fuckface or dickwad was earning in their second year out of university. I also banned them from discussing money with me, ever, a ban that remains in place to this day. 

Likely it helped that at the time I was reading up on the Phil Jackson and Jordan years at the Chicago Bulls, and how Jordan never complained about the contracts he signed, as is frustratingly common among NBA stars, taking responsibility for what he'd agreed to. Now that's pretty easy when Jordan was paid so much by the Bulls the NBA put rules in place such that his 90s salary was only matched by Steph Curry almost two decades later in 2010s money because inflation had allowed him to be paid what Jordan got in the 90s. But it resonated with the silent maths I'd done observing my parents growing up that you wanted to have the mental health of Michael Jordan, not Scottie Pippen, great as Pippen was.

And it's not all on my parents, they weren't the only silent maths exercise I did growing up. I've known enough rich people, as in people who have substantial amounts of wealth and observed the relative independence between wealth and quality of life.

To be sure, my plutophobic bigotry is not so irrational that I have a controversial take that sort of contradicts what peer reviewed studies have shown - money is hugely important when it prevents you from abject poverty, beyond that it doesn't improve your mental health at all, possibly even starts working against it.

I know so many wealthy people who suffer that I'm not worried that they "probably think this song is about you" because the sample size is so large, that I can say objectively that it's probably not. I don't have to think of anything specific, I like most people who grew up in the vicinity of wealth, know too much dirt, that it's a fairly safe generalisation.

I'm more concerned that my plutophobia offends people (excluding my parents) who actually suffered poverty and are yet to achieve or more importantly, enjoy, a level of financial security. Furthermore, it needs saying that the Australian Economy is a heinously fucked up renteir economy, such that it's not so much a rat race but a rats-deserting-a-sinking-ship race to secure the one biggest predictor of poverty in retirement - home ownership.

The Australian housing market is capitalised at 3x the Australian share market or thereabouts, median houseprices are in the vicinity of being 9.7x the median household income, our tax code incentivises investment in the unproductive housing sector over raising capital for the productive private sector (as in our government rewards people for buying housing at objectively bad prices, and punishes people for helping publicly listed companies raise capital for investment in future growth, innovation and productivity) and it's just fucked, it's so fucked that Australia is a place where if you investigated the main driver of the modal citizens stress, anxiety, depression, frustration, anger etc. it will most likely be how much they pay for housing, and if you ask the modal Australian citizen what the single best and most important thing they have done in their lives is they will likely say 'buying my own home.'

So I don't begrudge my average fellow citizen their dreams of being so rich they might be able to afford to be extorted painful amounts of money to purchase a speculatively held superfluous housing from a 'property investor' in the dream of using that 'asset' to live in themselves. 

I do begrudge people that wish to be so rich that they can have a portfolio of houses, cosmetic procedures, international vacations, club memberships, caviar etc. aka 'obscenely rich' trying to sell me their obscene vision. 

I never had a chance to meet Biggie Smalls, and I think maybe if you grew up so poor that 'birthdays were the worst days, now we sip champagne when we thirsty' I'd be like, yeah, go for it, that's hilariously crass. 

But otherwise, pass.

Plutophobia in the Workplace

It was time for the leader to unveil his vision for the future. I can't build it up anymore without it being a disservice - it was to grow revenue by 33% over the next 5 years. AKA an uninspiring vision.

I just want to do good work, for fair compensation, I'm happy to go above and beyond in performance, but not in personal sacrifice. We made a deal. 

But I've had bosses that have grown confused and frustrated by an inability to motivate me by dangling carrots in front of my face. I've had bosses that have reduced their sales methodology and philosophy to "I always pitch growth and nobody says no to growth." Then they meet me, and I don't care about growth in sales or revenue, and lets face it, what we are ultimately talking about, is growth in consumption.

Now, Corey Doctorow coined the term "enshitification" and there's now many explainer videos and podcasts on it. The problem being that growth can be achieved through enshitifying a product, that is to say deliberately doing bad work to make a product or service worse.

The famous example is Google, owned by the same company that owns blogger.com, where having captured somewhere north of 80% of the search market, Google search could only grow in one of two ways - the first was growth of the planets population, get a billion more users, thats 800 million more google advertising eyeballs to sell. Problem is, if you start that project now, it takes 18 years to come to fruition, and Google can't exactly make people make more people to grow their market share.

Plan B, make search worse. Deliberately make it worse so people have to search twice instead of once to find what they are looking for. That's what google did, selling twice the ad-space. An engineer resigned I believe, sooner than harm the product he'd built. As an employee, I'm like that engineer, or like a public servant.

The private sector in my experience, matches plutophobia with xenophobia, fear of the other, and in the private sector, people who are happy to up marginal cost to increase marginal value are the other to those who want to minimise costs to maximise profits.

This is what is wrong with me that gives me a complicated and quite dysfunctional relationship with the job market. Would you believe me if I told you how much job seeker advice proceeds from the assumptions "you want money right? so just do whatever you need to do to get more of it."?

Wrong. So do I still need to do whatever I need to do to get some of it? And what if they offer me more than I need? Can I negotiate? 

No. Not in my experience, in fact, much as, as a non-coffee drinker I am cautioned that I am making business awkward for everyone, it is also quite awkward to let it be known you don't care that much about money.

As such, plutophobia is definitely something wrong with me, because I can jam up the whole machine with my irregularity. I learned pretty quickly I need to be conscious of my lack of fucks given about extracting the max money possible from any given employer, when I am the top performer on a team of people who give maximal fucks about extracting max money, because what I'm willing to take effectively caps their ask.

This isn't hard for me, because as I hope I've imparted, I have no objection to having lots of money, my bigotry is towards that consumption based concept of 'rich'. I do feel some guilt having money lying around that could be invested in some endeavour, I think there is on some level an ethical obligation to have only so much savings as one needs to see off any emergencies, and the rest should be invested in something productive. 

But still, I imagine it is akin to being homosexual and having to exist in a culture of insecure homophobes who need constant reassurance that they are definitely into girls and girls are the way to go sexually. It is a conscious effort to pretend to care and thus validate people who see acts of consumption as meaningful achievements. 

I'm sure I've hurt people by flicking through their wedding photo albums and only feeling bored and confused. Of people buying a new car and I make the error of saying 'enjoy' instead of asking for a ride in it.

I know I'm being rude, I just can't catch myself in the moment, and it hurts me to pretend I am other than I am. But it isn't love to put my needs above yours. I don't mean to do it, I'm just seemingly so overwhelmingly outnumbered.

Perhaps I do well with kids not through emotional intelligence and perspective taking, but simply because kids have no money.

Post Text on the Suns v Thunder Sweep '25-'26 NBA Season

A series I paid little attention to, and I suspect, though it might just be algorithms, few people did. 

The Oklahoma City Thunder do not strike me as a fun team to watch win. SGA is not awarded as many free throws as Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers, but as the reigning finals MVP, SGA appears to be of the modern point guard mould, which is being known for flopping and shooting 3s sooner than passing or running an offense.

The Pheonix Suns are also, simply, not that team anyone wants to see swept. I don't mind Booker, I think he actually has the right idol and the right attitude. I love Brooks because he is the most forward in treating Lebron with the respect Lebron actually deserves. They are also a franchise of good character throughout all their notable eras. The team of Barkley and KJ and Nash. There's no schadenfreude in seeing the Suns get swept, it is simply, disappointing.

Disappointing but not interesting. That for me is the most noteworthy thing. It doesn't bode well for the sport when the least talked about team is the presumptive champion. I think they are secondary Spurs team, given that Duncan's finals appearances were often the lowest rated series this century, even his 2 beatdowns and 1 loss to Lebron James teams. But curiously, the contemporary San Antonio Spurs are a more interesting team than the Oklahoma City Thunder what with having Victor Wembanyama who is like a modern Kareem Abdul Jabbar, but less durable.

Not to use gamer speak, but I think there is something fundamentally broken in the Oklahoma City Thunder's basketball. It's broken in the sense that I suspect SGA is both their best player and entirely irrelevant. Like, if tomorrow the shocking news came through that SGA had injured himself eating poutine and was out for the rest of the post-season, I think the OKC would still be championship contenders. But not because they are a super team. They are more like a German World Cup soccer team, unremarkably good.

In the meantime, the Suns are I feel, objectively more interesting. They are rebuilding after Durant and helping to expose KDs white-elephant/poison chalice legacy. They fought hard to get 6 more games than the regular 82, losing the 7th seed to Portland Trailblazers before ending the Golden State Warriors season who I think would also have been annihilated by the OKC. 

I feel as the only team who will get swept in round 1, they weren't the most deserving of a sweep, and it bares acknowledging that it took 84 games to get to that sweep. Life is cruel, even to millionaires like Devin Booker.  

Time Loop Therapy

It's another post, but I'm processing something and I have the tremendous privilege of having the emotional regulation that, in this case means I often actually need stimulus to bring forth the emotions I just need to feel, otherwise I will remain functional to the point of being able to facilitate a strategic offsite or whatever.

Yesterday, in a circumstance that would ordinary result in a feeling of self loathing, I got right into the game 'Rue Valley' a cheap (literally) derivative of 'Disco Elysium' but not a bad game. Here, on my blog to a Web 1.0 audience, I would recommend it.

It's a point and click adventure game with a Disco Elysium/Y2K comic art style. It's central conceit is a timeloop or a 'Groundhogs day' premise. Like GHD, the time loop anomaly has no explanation and frankly, I don't fucking care about a game developer trying to explain the how and why of a time loop. Again, like GHD the object of the game is to achieve the personal growth threshold the protagonist needs. It culminates in an event, but ultimately it is just a revelation.

Unlike GHD, the loop is not a day, but a 47 minute window. This I think works well in the context of an adventure game, and it certainly isn't the first to be based on a time loop, Minit comes to mind as well as Zelda: Moroccan Mask Fiesta* but being not an omnivorous nor avaricious video game consumer, I'm sure there are at the very least dozens more, plus many games just wind up having save and load states that are functionally time loops, though your avatar becomes just another NPC in the time loop.

Unlike other time-loop based games and media, Rue Valley places your avatar Eugene something in the closing minutes of a therapy session. That's where each loop begins. 

Now, just in case you've never reflected on a time-loop scenario before, even if you've watched Edge Of Tomorrow or Groundhog's Day, you ostensibly have infinite time, immortality, but a very finite domain of possibility. With a whole day and advanced military technology, such as in Edge of Tomorrow the range of possibility is a massive geographic area, Tom Cruise's frontier of possibility was largely determined by helicopter. You are going to get something roughly like a circle but irregular taking into account headwinds and tailwinds, but that range of possibility isn't even - the closer you get to the frontier the less time you have to do anything, so in simple terms, if you have 3 hours in your time loop, then any restaurant you can drive to in an hour, you have 2 hours to enjoy a nice long lunch, if you drive for 2 hours and 55 minutes, you are going to have to go through a McDonald's drive through or something.

Then consider, that Cruise's time loop in Edge of Tomorrow is a solitary experience. The 'novum' of Edge of Tomorrow, that makes it novel compared to Groundhog's Day (though not necessarily better) is that Emily Blunt plays a character that used to be in a timeloop. But Cruise has to invest some time each day convincing Blunt that he is in a timeloop, something she is well positioned to be credulous of, whereas any time Bill Murray needed to convince Andie McDowell he was in a time-loop (and I think we only see that once) it takes a significant investment of time and energy to overcome her incredulity, like Bill Murray has to perform essentially a Deren Brown level mentalist display in a Diner to get Andie's buy-in.

Beyond Emily blunt, there's going to be a degree of tedium built into Cruise's time-loop. You can figure out how to commandeer a chopper to go AWOL to Paris to try and convince a General to give you back an Alien Hive Mind tracking device, but it's going to be fundamentally different to the experience of say owning a car that you take a regular commute in. Instead of pressing a button on a fob to open and fire up your vehicle, you instead need to repeat a conversation ad nauseum that you know is the most efficient way to get in that helicopter and off to Paris, and that conversation is but a string of repetitive tedium you have to go through again and again to get to your experimental threshold where something new might happen. We see Cruise for example, having to march in formation every loop until he can roll under a truck and get to Emily Blunt's training area where he needs to convince her as quickly as possible that he is in a time loop in order to use her rank to get him on a helicopter to the next destination where he is going to tinker with something new.

Okay...

The Drama of The Gifted Child

Is what Rue Valley had me thinking about, because in the 47 minute loop, eventually you get dialogue options at the beginning of each loop to simply stand up and walk out of your Therapy session. This enables you to get straight in your car without checking into your motel and drive to a roadblock so you can walk to a bar that has a trail you can hike to a house you can break into all in 45 minutes so that you can have a 2 minute exchange with a man you need information from. 

You can't afford a minute of pleasantries with your therapist because it diminishes the possibilities of that 47 minute loop.

You also get dialogue options to call people on your phone to discuss big important things and under the conceit of a brief timeloop there is no reputational damage to be done by simply hanging up when you have the information you needed. 

In Australia, we are probably among the better nations in the world in terms of putting more people in reach of affordable mental health care. I'm told in my city, virtually no practitioners bulk bill anymore, so that sucks but it's not like there were salad days where every practitioner bulk billed meaning you could find as a matter of time, a therapist that worked for you.

And even when I was able to charge my sessions to medicare, no rebate or copayment required, this was only under the auspices of a mental health care plan - limited to 10 sessions per year, and the default was 5 with your GP needed to prescribe you an additional 5 with a repeat visit to the doctor's office and reevaluation.

I never had trouble getting my full ten compliment, but the structural limitations begin to emerge. If you don't gel with the first therapist you get a referral to, you don't get a refund on any consultations you've had. So if it takes two sessions to get the first therapist you try up to speed on your family of origin, recurring dreams, significant others and psycho-genic physical maladies, and then when they start attempting goal-directed conversations in your third session and you realize that you don't respect them enough to want to continue with them, you've used up 3 of your potential 10 subsidized sessions for the next 11 months, that's a huge switching cost for most people who can't afford $200+ a week or fortnight to simply retain a therapist.

Earlier this year I read a book called 'The Drama of The Gifted Child' first published in 1979, it somewhat predates I suspect, what "Gifted" came to mean in popular conscious. In the context of this book, gifted really does refer to the cynical definition '2% of the population + my child' teacher's attributed to parents of their students. But Alice Miller is using gifted in a sense that applies to pretty much everyone.

The 'gift' in that book, is basically the child's adaptive response to who their early caregivers are. Their protean brains wire up to make them whoever they need to be to get their basic needs bet by whoever their parents tend to be. The nature of this 'gift' then is quite varied, from a child that learns they need to have meltdowns to get what they need from their parents, to a child that learns they need to be invisible if they want to survive. 

Under adverse childhood experiences, I presume this gift becomes more a hardware issue - if an infant needs to wire up a certain way to survive infancy, then they likely wind up with fucked up endochrine systems that in adulthood will mistake danger for safety and safety for danger, going home with the drug dealing biker in the public bathroom sooner than the nice charity volunteer (who likely has his own issues) because the psychopathic criminal is familiar and the philanthropist is alien and strange.

But even more modal childhood experiences lead to drama inducing gifts, people who are basically alienated from themselves because they were shaped by responding to banal, run of the mill, parental anxieties. For example, the number of people of East Asian ethnicity that have commented that their only four career options they felt themselves to have were Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer or Accountant with the latter two being 'loser' status, but sufficiently respectable.

That's the premise of the book, and its a short read that holds up, I think I had an edition that was revised in the 90s or the early 2000s. What has me reflecting on it after playing Rue Valley, is the books frequent allusions to patients wasting time on a recurring formality, an anxiety, an insecurity.

That behaviour being needing to reassure a therapist that they had 'happy childhoods' with 'loving parents' what I might call from a managerial perspective giving the 'benefit of the doubt' or making 'conciliatory remarks' or some principle of charity, like 'steelmanning' your parents efforts to be parents.

In this context, the therapist is in the time loop, you are their patient, they have an hour, you need to reassure them as an adult speaking to a non-judgemental adult (at least having a non-judgemental conversation) over ten or fifteen minutes, how much you appreciate all the good your mums or your dads or any combination of the above did and how big the slice of the pie chart of your childhood is that didn't cause you issues at all.

As though, we engaging in therapy, are worried that a therapist will call child services and have us put into a group home with troubled youth at the age of 33. 

But of course, its not just time wasted, its perhaps the first major obstacle we face in a therapeutic process - that all the things our parents got right, are completely inconsequential in addressing mental health issues.

Furthermore, I find it totally plausible, that many patients will not disclaim how much they love and appreciate their parents once and be done with it, but qualify every reflection on their complicated relationship with their childhood caregivers over and over.

This is something I do, in part because its true, my parents got a lot right and there's a lot I appreciate, but there's also the element of it being a complete waste of precious resources that rings true as well.

Akin to Pete Hegseth taking the US Press corp. to task for failing to report the news 'patriotically' like the martyred mother he is. To the public interest, everything the US military gets right or does well is un-newsworthy in light of the goalless, illegal war of choice that has fucked up the entire global energy supply at tremendous expense to the US taxpayer both through military expenditure and raised costs of living where they most likely inferred point of the 'excursion' was to stop people from discussing the Epstein files, possibly with the delusional strategic objective of getting everyone in the US talking about how awesome and great the president is.

I think if you got stuck in a time-loop where at the conclusion of each therapy session rewound you back to the beginning of your therapy session, until you had the revelation necessary to begin the process of healing from your child-self's gift of a survival strategy perfectly tailored to your infant caregivers, by the 10th or 14th iteration, you would have come to the conclusion that you shouldn't spend 10 minutes talking about all the sacrifices you know your mother made for you and how difficult her own upbringing was and how good you had it in comparison and how you feel petty and spoiled complaining about your thing, and just go straight to the part where you acknowledge that your mother spent a bit too much time towelling off your penis as a child and what the fuck was that about?

Or just get to the part where you vividly recall your parents buying icecreams but they declined to give you your own one, offering you licks of theirs instead, and laughing at your dramatic refusal of this compromise, what the fuck was that about?

Or moving away from examples in the book that are likely timeless but very 70s, just get straight to the part where every time you looked up at your dad during your tennis lessons you saw him on his phone what the fuck was that about?

Or getting right into how your mum used to take you for a babycino and discuss botox injections with her friends and persisted in asking your opinion on cosmetic procedures she was considering right into your teens what the fuck was that about?

Conclusion

I struggle with this, I understand social norms intellectually, including taboos, even where I disagree with them it is hard for me to model behaviours that I think should be norms.

I for one, have an acute sense of fairness and even though I'd argue that my take in the recent post 'You Could Not Come To My House' reflects somewhat unflatteringly on my parents, I'm confident if I review it, it will contain one of these disclaimers.

What irritates me, with respect to fairness, is that I know people whose parents are basically, total cunts, like objectively shitty people and my own parents shit all over them, I wouldn't be surprised if these adult children of shitty parents haven't consciously wished they had my parents, and would scold me for saying publicly anything remotely critical of my own parents negative contributions to the man that I am and it frankly, fucks me off that these people will be publicly effusive in their praise of their parents, make speeches that mention how 'inspirational' and 'amazing' their parents are completely omitting the part where they told their kid 'your mother and I would have gotten a divorce but for you' and I feel safe saying that, because I know numerous people that have divulged to me their parents said this to them and it fucked them up, and these are the people who would benefit the most from just cutting the shit and admitting to anyone including themselves that you know, maybe their parents didn't try their best? Maybe they gave into their limits as human beings, but still failed to achieve a parenting threshold of excellence? Maybe opted to lie to themselves and ask their children to lie along with them rather than take responsibility?

It's not fair on my parents that the social norm is 'family is sacrosanct' and its the one thing adult children of shitbag parents have over those that were at least stable and solvent and non-physically violent. Emancipated adults generally are free to not 'show some appreciation, being a parent is hard' when they can open with 'my parents put cigarettes out on me as a baby.' 

Edge of Tomorrow, Groundhog Day and likely Rue Valley are all PG-13 rated media. PG-13 is okay I guess because it allows for occassional course language, some violence and perhaps references to drugs and alcohol. The sacrosanctity of parents, family in general, the taboo in speaking ill in public and even confidential therapy sessions where evidently too many of us feel the need to waste time on qualifiers for fear of being judged by a professional, that to me is G 'General' or 'E' Everybody.

I've also been reflecting since a friend reread aloud a memo from a legal department regarding our swearing like sailors for media that was supposed to be G-rated, that G is really a comforting fantasy for parents struggling with a core parental duty to model for their children that it is possible to be happy in an imperfect world. We were young, over 13, but at the time I gave the sensitive public the benefit of the doubt that they simply weren't aware that most kids by the age of 6 or 8 know "shit", "piss", "fuck", "cunt", "cocksucker", "motherfucker", and "tits" and use them in their vocabulary. 

The list of taboo terms I feel expanded around ten years ago to include "gay" "faggot" and "retard" with the distinction that most adults I know would likely be afraid to even use them on the 'mention' side of the use-mention distinction and I guess thats different because Carlin's seven words you can't say on TV adults definitely said off TV for a very long time and either successfully concealed their full vocabulary from their children or forbade them from saying them. But schools network kids up so one set of loose lips sinks the whole G-rated childhood dilemma.

I guess the point is G is a fucking delusion, pointless to the extent that it is disturbing when you meet a kid who is actually scandalised rather than thrilled to hear an adult refer to something as 'bullshit' or a 'piece of shit' and I think the parents that succeed in preserving infant innocence have luckily also succeeded in fucking up their child already.

The key is that friction, that inefficiency that makes it so we are stuck in a time loop, where no matter the behaviour I model, based on the persuasive case 'The Drama of The Gifted Child' makes, a bunch of time is going to be eaten up, day after day, from here to the edge of tomorrow, having to have the conversation where I convince each and every person to dispense with the formality of publicly projecting not-even-perfect-parents-but-above-average parents and ideal childhoods.

Personal Beef

 I watched series 2 of Beef, I almost gave up halfway through because the beef in series 2 got a bit bleak, a bit morbid and I wasn't in the mood.

What got me back, eventually to ride out that emotional nadir, and I want to stress it wasn't bad just more than I could handle at that time and particularly with my watching habits of after gym and before bed, was my memory of liking the conclusion of the first season, where Amy lies down beside Danny in his hospital bed, both having successfully blown up their lives through their eponymous 'beef.'

Horse Holding

When it comes to textual analysis, I don't subscribe to authorial intent - indeed, particularly when it comes to fiction, I would say the point of telling a story is to surrender authorial intent. As such, I don't truck with what my sense being, the numerous people who believe that through the dubious art of "close reading" a text they can "get it" as though there is an authoritative thing to get.

Consider for a moment, what a stupidly grandiose game it is: we essentially have to buy into the notion that the point of some text is for the author to communicate what they want to say to us, by not just out and saying it. 

I'm much more in the camp, that the utility of stories lies in the fact that they are flexible. That one can relate to a story by projecting oneself into it. 

Okay, now we can mount up and get back to the regular programming:

Second Season Finale

For me, I'm not interested in a final shot where a living mandela of characters are revealed to imply a never ending story. What interests me personally about the resolution of the season 2 finale, is what I project to be the same release of dramatic tension that allows the story to resolve.

Specifically, I feel in both season 1 and season 2 what the protagonists obtain from the destruction their actions bring about, is the revelation that they don't hate someone or something but in fact love.

Danny and Amy realise that they love each other, having destroyed their most important relationships in the process, and possibly in all other material ways, have ruined their lives.

Season 2 is more complicated, more bitter sweet. We have two couples juxtaposed, perhaps four but we don't need the other two for my purposes.

We have Josh and Lindsay, and Ashley and Austin.

Josh

Josh's ending is the sweetest. He falls in love with his wife Lindsay after their relationship and lives are totally destroyed. He obtains this epiphany in their divorce proceedings, releasing all acrimony that came from the illusion of hate and resentment and simply lets go of the conflict. Signing his contract extension then his divorce papers. 

He's then able to make the ultimate sacrifice for Lindsay, putting her needs not so much above his own, as as his own. He needs to go to jail in order for Lindsay to obtain the life she wants.

Josh goes to jail for 8 years, on fraud charges where he gains control of his life by relinquishing it. He is offered Lindsay's address so presumably he can go after her, but he chooses not to know, confident Lindsay doesn't wish to be found.

Lindsay

Lindsay's ending is bitter-sweet. She falls in love with Josh after he destroys his own future to save her. She is almost too late in her revelation that she does not hate her former husband but in fact loves him. She does get to embrace him as a lover, after his arrest and before his incarceration. We learn that they lose touch, that she relocates.

We find Lindsay in the epilogue, grieving her lost life, love and happiness. She watches Josh interviewed after his release, where Josh is able to communicate with her, but she can no longer reach him. She has imprisoned herself in a new life, with a partner and child away from the man she loves. She cannot leave her family to go to him.

As such, Lindsay's story is kind of the direct opposite of Amy and Danny's in season 1. Lindsay's destruction of her own life severs her relationship with Josh, the most important relationship she has, and she obtains important relationships without the same love.

For me, Lindsay's circumstance elevates an observation like she "still has feelings for" from the non-trivial via a subtle social taboo. A superficial evaluation of the situation would weigh a child more heavily than an ex-husband. But consider it from the child's point of view - her mother is hiding, upset, lying and keeping secrets from her. This is the significance of Lindsay's "still has feelings for" her daughter is a consolation prize, after life did not work out.

She does not hate Josh, she loves him, her daughter is the second Burberry to her, which Josh took custody of in their divorce settlement, as a likely foreshadowing that he would figure out his feelings sooner than Lindsay.

Josh is free, Lindsay is in hell, receiving the wages of her sin of cowardice, for not taking responsibility for the failure of their marriage as Josh ultimately did.

Austin

Austin gets the worst ending, his epiphany is that he doesn't love Ashley. He doesn't love Ashley, tells her this, and then fails to leave her. 

Austin gives me a bit of a guessing game, I suspect the key factor driving his decisions is actually that he is young and correspondingly naive. The tantalising option is the ironclad law of projection, he can recognise that Ashley is impeded from real love by abandonment issues, and possibly this is because Austin has his own.

Less mysterious is why holding the MacGuffin, he makes a seemingly impulsive decision to choose Ashley. Eunice can't give Austin what he wants for it, appealing instead to his morality. So he becomes Ashley, someone he cannot love.

I find the silent maths pretty trivial, Eunice understands that Austin doesn't love her, he is expressing something else, because he doesn't know her, and she can't lie to him, as she doesn't know him. They were merely attracted, but Austin in his desperation escalates it to crazy town, and crazy attracts crazy taking him right back to Ashley.

Much like Lindsay, Austin is left trapped in hell with Ashley and their son, again hidden by a taboo that Beef tackles - the child doesn't outweigh in Austin's case - the love he does not feel for his wife. 

Austin is worse off than Lindsay though, because his epiphany is in realizing who he doesn't love, but he has no Josh, nor Lindsay. There is nobody to reach for or who can reach him, he's all alone in his destroyed life.

The sliver of hope for Austin is in his relative freedom, he is young, he can divorce Ashley much as Lindsay did Josh and perhaps find someone he loves. But again, rather than Ashley and Austin simply stepping into the vacuum left by Josh and Lindsay, Austin is trapped by the complication of the child he has with Ashley, more so than marriage, tethering him forever to her. Furthermore, there is no epiphany for Austin to attain like Josh and Lindsay, that he does in fact love Ashley. 

The tension has been released already, Austin is stuck narratively, there is nowhere for his character to grow, he is living the hell he signed up for, that he chose.

Ashley

Ashley's story concludes when she hands Austin the thumb drive. She has had the epiphany that she loves Austin in only a slightly delayed response to Austin's sharing his epiphany that he doesn't love her.

Again, there's a bit of a guessing game as to the silent maths, but there's enough there that it isn't a wild guessing game.

Throughout the series, Ashley is the most egregious in using someone as a means rather than an end, that person being Austin. We can infer from what Austin tells us, arrested in egocentricity due to the abandonment she suffered at the hands of her parents. From the second episode, we see that Austin doesn't factor into Ashley's equations as a person with his own wants and needs.

What I'd guess is that by 'naming the game' and losing Austin, Ashley finally sees Austin as an end, rather than a means. He wakes her up, and confers her personal epiphany that she does indeed love Austin by giving him the thumbdrive, mirroring Josh who frees himself by relinquishing control.

But Austin deprives her of the liberation Josh gets to enjoy, and it's probably a tedious quibble to ask if her fate is worse than Austin's. Austin in the same act of nihilism, returns both he and Ashley to the prison of their relationship - invalidating Ashley's epiphany by lying through his actions and suggesting that he was not a worthwhile end, but merely a means all along.

Ashley is left disconnected, she is stripped of her epiphany by being returned to control. She is stuck with Austin and a child from whom she is alienated. 

Again, unlike Josh and Lindsay, Ashley has no hope of escape where Josh and Lindsay were out of control, Ashley is in control she aspired to become Josh, whereas Josh began in a position neither he nor his wife waned him to be in, the job was a diversion.

Brazen Bull

My first real relationship was going alright until my girlfriend had to relocate to the northern state of our country. It was an insurmountable obstacle to someone who was 16 years old and we kind of left our breakup ambiguous.

What was unambiguous, was that Sarah had gotten with another guy, I didn't take it well. This was somewhat of a surprise to the both of us, as I had expressed repeatedly that I didn't really care if she hooked up with other guys so long as ultimately she came back. I was way ahead of my time in terms of polyamory and open relationships, but I was also way ahead on discovering sexual jealousy is physiological thing you can't always think your way over, around or even through.

Prospero Colonna was a noteworthy Italian condottiero who despite being seperated by centuries and also considerable military achievements, had an experience not dissimilar to my own:

Confident in the constancy of the lady of his affections, Prospero took for his companion a gentleman of low degree, to whom she, unfortunately, transferred the love he thought was his own. Feeling that he had been the author of his own ruin, Prospero took for device the bull of Perillus, which had proved the death of its inventor, with the motto, Ingenio experior funera digna meo, "I suffer a death befitting my invention." ~ from his wikipedia page.

The bull of Perillus is better known, if known at all as the execution device "the brazen bull" a hollow bronze bull-shaped casting that a person can be trapped inside and cooked to death in. Perillus supposedly invented it and then died in it.

Prospero, unlike me, was likely a mature man and living in a time when marriages were likely still mostly property transactions so we can't really know how hard his wife's infidelity hit him. For me, the jealousy and subsequent dissolution of my first intimate relationship hit me hard and I certainly moped and became despondent and disinterested for quite some time. 

While I have vivid memories of telling people it took me two years to get over Sarah, reflecting on the timelines it seems impossible for that to be true. Certainly it took me about two years before I started seriously dating again, but I could probably name four or five girls I crushed on in between Sarah and Suzanne, so I must have regained my will to play at reproducing earlier than I boasted.

What I remember more vividly was the release, a profound thing that didn't follow from any dramatic event. I was walking, and could no longer place myself on an exact street, because I walked so many of Ballarat's streets so frequently the memories have become the equivalent of memories of brushing my teeth - so routine and similar I couldn't pick a specific one out.

But the sweet release of flipping a switch and realizing "oh I don't hate Sarah I love her." is vivid. It honestly still feels like a death-rebirth experience. A lesson I am incredibly grateful that I learned early.

Everything's Ruined

I remember a bitter resentment my friend Brenton evoked because he had this girlfriend that kept cheating on him, and they kept getting back together. My experience of relationships was not that, and has never been that. I haven't come close to the dysfunction and misery of on-again-off-again indecision.

But I did resent that Brenton got second chances, that someone kept giving him another go. My partners just left me, and that was that. I had to deal with it. Get over it. 

Yeah, I had some backslides with Claire and Chantelle, but this was more just part of a dumping process, the part where my partners processed their guilt, Chan and I got back together for maybe a week, seeing each other maybe once and feeling the ruined nature of our new reality as a couple before Chan regained her confidence that she'd been right the first time. Claire was the closest I ever got to reconciling with an ex, but after giving it much thought, she chose to move onwards and forwards.

For me though, there has never been a real triumph of hope over experience. I don't know if its me, or a specific combination of me and the women I've grown close to. 

I don't think I've ever been dumped for stupid reasons though. Like nobody has ever broken up with me over something they thought they cared about but turned out not to.

This is what I think Beef captures and resonates for me personally. Yes, I would say pretty much the best feeling in the world, the best breakthrough, the most liberating experience is to realise you love something you thought you hated. This doesn't mean a happy ending is on the cards.

That happy ending you are hoping for? You just had it. Furthermore, I would say most of the benefit is in the relationship you now have with yourself. 

It's so good not to waste time and life hating someone you love. Sarah was my first girlfriend, I've never hated a girlfriend since, I never fed that dog named hate again.

This benefit doesn't in my experience translate into any greater relationship success. As the great Airplane! (1980) said:

Elaine Dickinson: It takes so many things to make love last. But most of all, it takes respect, and I can't live with a man I don't respect.

I think its fabulous if you can realise you actually love someone who cheated on you, took advantage of you, discarded you, neglected you, abused you...and that's why their treatment of you hurts so bad. I think its a wonderful gift you can give yourself to forgive them, and free yourself.

From none of this fabulosity and wonder does it follow that you should, could or need be with them. Beef shows people blowing up their lives again and again to attain this sacred knowledge, but nothing gets fixed, there's no going back, the actions have consequences the most important of which is disillusioning the protagonists.

The liberty is in how you feel about something. Perhaps the relationship you have with your own memory. Again, Josh is in agony living with Lindsay, anxious and on edge, incompatible, reaching, stressed, isolated, alienated it's all there on screen. Lindsay's misery, makes him miserable.

Also on screen is how much happier he is in jail. He loves Lindsay, and is relieved of all the self-destruction when he is no longer with her. It is not important to him that he is in a position where he can control Lindsay, as a means to his own ends, just that he knows she exists, that she is in control of herself.

Sarah and I are still friends, she has photos of us as a couple she sent me recently. There can often be years between us speaking, but it seems that what attracted us to each other was and remains real. Our lives parted, we've lived more of them apart than we ever shared. I've fallen in love with other people and had much more significant relationships as has she. But I appreciate what we had, it was a good start and it put me in good stead, even if later partners have been confused by how well I've taken the failures of our relationships, its because I just don't have time for that illusory hate.

Missing

I think my take on Beef will be a rare one, I watched a video 'explaining' the end of season 2 because the thumbnail suggested Lindsay's time-skip femullet had some significance. 

That person's take was that Lindsay was the only one to escape, as in, she had the best fate and leaned heavily into Ashley becomes Josh and Austin becomes Lindsay and the wheel of time just keeps on turning.

I do think my interpretation is in there though, in the text, not even the subtext. I just don't think most people will take it away, an abject lesson in the limited effect of media, so ah, stop policing language it doesn't matter that much. 

A Naive Series Part 2: Totalitarianism

"Naive" is French for gullible or childlike, or near enough. I am not a lexicologist. What I am is consumed by the question "what are people?" to which my best answer is "no one thing" but this is kind of an unsatisfying answer in the same way that J.P. Morgan's market forecast "it will fluctuate" is more accurate than it is useful.

Naive as a prefix

Being part 2, naive can be treated as a synonym for default, or factory settings for the organic factory for minds that is the amniotic sac. I probably shouldn't myself be authoritarian when it comes to nature v nurture, so we might also treat it simply as "most prevalent" or "modal" if the naive-isms might better be explained by status quo parenting. 

This series is about the kind of intuitive sense-making schema people operate unless a considerable force (education, in the broader sense) is acted upon it.

In part 1, I looked at naive chauvinism, which is in summary that most people unless educated out of it, unreasonably believe their own preferences are superior to others - eg. that their Grandma makes the best chocolate cake in the world, through to the way they drive is reasonable and everyone else drives stupid.

From here it is a short hop to 'Naive totalitarianism' in fact if my assertion/speculation that we tend to naive chauvinism, with chauvinism being an unreasonable belief in the superiority of your in-groups whatever, it would be surprising if we were not then logically prone to naive totalitarianism.

Perhaps the best and most famous expression of what I assert is naïve totalitarianism comes from Alexander Solzhenitsyn:

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.

Alexander laments via the words "if only" as life in the Gulags has taught him that no such simple operation exists, alas if we subtract "if only" then we go from lamentation to assertion:

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.

That's naive totalitarianism. 

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism will have a wikipedia page I'm here to give you a naive version. I am probably using it as a synonym for authoritarianism rather than its extreme version. I may also increase the accuracy of my assertion by suggesting that we are naive frustrated totalitarians.

So totalitarianism is basically a really high confidence level. Like you are as confident that you know how society works as you are confident that 2 apples plus 2 more apples equals 4 apples. Totalitarianism is a belief in a simple world in which there's good people and bad people. 

It's a concept I would probably best summarize in a list of behaviours:

1. Believes in an orthodoxy, speaks in absolutes "Dances With Wolves is a great movie."
2. Polices speech - both words and topics of discussion. "Mum you can't say 'six-seven' you're so uncool."
3. Subscription to the orthodoxy is more important than actions and behaviours. "Well I just can't believe that. John is a Christian."
4. Practices double standards. "Don't turn your nose up at spirituality." - [turns nose up at natural sciences.]
5. Dehumanises the outgroup. "Girl, If I were you I'd take that Temu-Versace belt and hang yourself with it."
6. Believes the orthodoxy can only fail through lack of commitment. "We just haven't tried Communism properly."

What makes someone good, is that they "get it" and so are "one of us" where "it" is the roadmap to utopia. 

What makes someone bad, is that they "don't get it" or worse are projected to "get it, but are too selfish/uncommitted" and so are one of "them."

When you presume the answers are known to a problem that is understood, then everything reduces to commitment. To not conform then allows only two possibilities - you are stupid and require re-education, or you are bad and require active resistance.

Generally bad people are subhuman by virtue of being bad, and everyone (or maybe just the good people) are suffering because of insufficient commitment to being good.

For me, the big tells of naive totalitarianism are pretty simple: do they speak in absolutes? do they get indignant when challenged? does the person have double standards? Explained visually here by the brilliant Tom Gauld:

Sourced here

I feel that this is sufficiently broad to cover all extremes of authoritarianism that we have actually seen, like Ye Olde Theocracies (through to contemporary religious totalitarianism) where heretics, heathens, apostates and adulterers are targeted by violence. 

Thru to Fascism, generally characterised by a belief that a nation exists within the blood of some ethnic group (rather than a social convention, legally constructed on paper), and so long as you really are into that, you can be as radical socialist as you like so long as benefits only accrue to the pure blooded people.

And Leninist-Marxism where the workers are too stupefied by class consciousness to "get it" and so Communism has to be imposed by the intellectual elites and the people are liberated from dissenting opinions until such a time as they awaken into the utopia of communism via Lenin's fist.

Naive + Totalitarianism

I would like to step back from any specific ideology, or formal context for totalitarianism for a moment to emphasize the naivete.

Naive totalitarianism if I had to bet, is going to have its foundation in the emotion of anxiety. Anxiety is a response to uncertainty, and for many people anxiety is unpleasant to the point that it prompts them to try and take control. A really banal example is an examination for a subject you aren't confident in. Some people can live with the anxiety of not knowing what grade they will get from A-F on the exam, others cannot and take control by studying excessively. 

The naive totalitarianism comes out in these situations when a friend asks them "hey do you want to play brickball this lunch?" and notice this is an open question, allowing for the uncertainty of yes or no or even counterproposals of activities. The response is "No, I have to study." a definitive statement that is untrue, the speaker could not study and maybe get a B or a C instead of a B+ that will result from the extra hours of study, instead of becoming a doctor they might pick up a trade and work in construction. Such hyperbolic speech we, on some level understand as escalating a mere want into some kind of need.

If that last sentence feels like an alien way of thinking to you, you may be living the naive totalitarian life.

"The customer is always right" "Bridezilla" "Kitchen Nightmares" all give us banal concepts of naive totalitarianism we can see everyday without needing bold graphic swastikas and goosestepping soldiers parading in order to experience it. 

"The customer is always right" suggests that all service roles are beholden to, and measured against, the ideals of the customer, customers can treat their expectations of service as an orthodoxy that is not determined by reasoned debate or even market forces but simply the emotions of how the customer is used to being treated (eg. by US waiters working for tips vs Australian waiters who are employed by the business owner) or expect to be treated, (someone who has booked a holiday to Paris based on watching Ratatouille) 

"Bridezilla" I've been fortunate to never encounter in person, though we could generalize it out to any event where the ostensible host takes as orthodoxy, their egocentricity. I also... while open to the possibility that "Bridezilla" refers to some extreme...I would also apply it to a sentiment as simple as a bride or groom getting frustrated because "nobody is dancing" where we can begin to see the totalizing nature of mandatory fun. The hosts and event planners may think they are throwing a great wedding reception for their guests but the moment they start stipulating how classy (scripting the best-mans speech and feeding it to him through an earpiece) or unclassy (making everyone get out of their seats to dance the "Chicken dance") We are just objectifying people in a totalitarian way.

And as for Kitchen Nightmares, well this sums up the totalitarian nature of Friedmanesque, Chicago-school Neoliberalism. Not all the time, but so often the Kitchen Nightmare is born of the business owner (who can simply be some dipshit with a string of failures that has taken out a loan in his stepdaughters name because his own credit rating is through the floor) gets his or her or their way, even if they haven't been to culinary school and are employing someone who has. 

Usefully, kitchen nightmares exposes an exact counterexample to the totalitarian attitude of "the customer is always right" with the more transparent totalitarian attitude of "the owner is always right." Where customers refuse to eat the food and pay for it. Yet the workers who need the shitty job taking frozen food out of supermarket boxes and deep frying it in oil that is overdue for a change, are subjected to a naive totalitarian regime by virtue of having to come to work and follow directions (or lack thereof) in order to collect a pay check.

Though not a perfect segue, it is segue enough for me to then suggest that you probably live in, and under some kind of totalitarian regime. I assert this because I think most employers and most family units are going to be characterised by naive totalitarianism, because of our shared propensity toward naive totalitarianism.

Most employers, and many families have an authoritarian structure, even if the authoritarians lack real power - like parents of adult children whose offspring go no contact - a large subject on its own, but the gist of which is that people become more set in their ways as they age, we tend to rethink less and parents get cut off because they treat their preferences as non-negotiable.

The All Important Monopoly Boardgame

My table-top and role-playing gaming friends appear to actively hate "Monopoly" and the place it occupies as the pre-eminent family boardgame.

And Monopoly does suck and has a surprising propensity to associate itself with nefarity. You may consider just this section but a mere first draft for a project I plan to use to venture into the overcrowded marketplace of economics explainers. Here an excerpt from Monopoly's wikipedia page:

The winner is the player remaining after all others have gone bankrupt.

In many ways humanity at present faces two major existential threats everyone is largely tired of hearing about - nuclear annihilation and climate catastrophe. The former involves us collectively resisting the urge to wipe ourselves out through nuclear warfare, and most people are under-anxious about this prospect given a recent return of 'dickheads' as heads of state of nuclear powers like the US, Russia, China and Israel that give off a "fuck y'all I've got mine" vibe. 

The latter, climate catastrophe we are also likely under-anxious about but not for lack of trying, the anxiety just manifests as a 'freeze' response rather than fight or flight because unfortunately, unlike nuclear annihilation for which freezing prevents the threat, climate catastrophe involves en-masse lifestyle changes.

But I am increasingly of the opinion that we cannot take collective action on climate change at global or local levels because there are other problems in the way, and the "monopoly mindset" is a big one. 

In a "lucky country" like Australia that is prosperous and safe, there's a reputation that everything here is trying to kill you. That you walk under a tree and a bear will drop onto you, you walk along a beach and pick up a pretty shell that is in fact a cone fish which stabs you causing you to stumble and fall into a rock pool where a blue ring octopus poisons you disorienting you so you walk out into the water through the tendrils of a box-jellyfish before a shark takes a bite out of your leg making you easy prey for the saltwater crocodile that passes on the shark since you already are bleeding out and munches on you as the rip-current drags you out to sea beyond rescue and you console yourself that you would have died from skin-cancer early anyway but you'll sure miss your home among the constantly on fire gumtrees.

That's all just Australian's pulling your leg, drop bears are a myth and the deadly sun, fire season, snakes, spiders, kangaroos, emus, jellyfish, shellfish, octopuses, platypuses, crocodiles, stingrays, birds et all are perfectly safe so long as you get nowhere near them. 

What most Australians have to contend with is living in a society where everyone approaches life like a monopoly game they are trying to win. 

Now the conventional wisdom in Australia more takes the form of "bankrupt or be bankrupted" hence people are urged to get a flimsy pretext of a job in order to mortgage themselves up to the eyeballs as quickly as possible, a strategy we are so good at that the age at which people purchase their first home is getting older and older under the auspices of this common sense.

The Australian public sector ie. the taxpayer invented Wifi at the CSIRO, and of course the achievements of the Australian private sector are even more impressive...

...

...

...Crocodile Dundee and Mad Max?

So the naive totalitarianism comes in because Australia is a country where unfortunately everyone is trying to "win" a zero-sum game. Which is why monopoly the boardgame is important, because after you win by bankrupting everyone else, not only is the game over but everyone hates you.

Monopoly is a false analogy for an economy but its enduring appeal to the frustration of actual boardgame enthusiasts, I suspect is its appeal to our naive totalitarianism, our psychology that evolved over at least a hundred and fifty thousand years of being homeless people, where if we asked our ancestors "what did you accomplish today?" and they answered "well I woke up, had a snack, lay around for a bit, fixed myself lunch, felt tired, had a nap, got up but felt groggy so masturbated to wake myself up, ate some berries, lit a fire and went to sleep." their peers would regard this as an incredibly productive day and we would think it had all the hallmarks of depression.

We used to be so economically unproductive that being totalitarian, trying to "win" at life was pretty harmless, just like in 2025 there are still groups of people who live hunter gatherer lifestyles, and we can see some life-supporting plant that belongs to a nomadic tribe who are all like "fuck off this is ours and if you pick a fruit we'll kill you." and this totalitarian desire to control this resource and dictate who may and who cannot benefit from it does not become a geopolitical issue unless that plant sits on the proposed path of an oil or gas pipeline. 

But a majority of humans now belong to nation-states, and people treat them not as an infinite game where we co-operate to keep the game going, a game whose gains are all based on cooperation to build open and tolerant societies, but a zero-sum game where the in-group needs to take control and force the outgroup out.

For the last decade I've been experiencing painfully the colonial irony of what right-wing commentators have come to call "wokeness" and left-wing people have continually disowned any labels in order to shirk accountability. A political disposition that is overwhelmingly white and colonial in vibes. An obvious example being "Latinx" a New England exonym non-violently imposed upon everyone from the long and diverse histories of Latin American colonies-come-independent nations by institutions like PBS and the Democratic Party for the benefit of their benefactors.

Obligatory acknowledgement that an increasingly Christian-nationalist right, and global totalitarian counterparts (eg. Han supremacy in China and Taiwan, Aryan supremacists in India, Japanese supremacy in Japan et al.) practice their own cancel culture and identity politics and muster no-more-if-not-less dignity about it. 

But its all monopoly, its trying to seize territory whether it is literal "Autonomous Zones" or linguistic territory regarding pronouns for exclusive use by an in-group that is trying to drive the out-group bankrupt.

I am not a libertarian, but I aspire to be non-totalitarian by saying nothing can be imposed without public consultation. A more general way of saying this is everything has to be up for discussion to be the constructive and productive least-worst ideal of government by the people, of the people, for the people.

Alas, instead of trying to keep the game going by making it fun for as many people as possible, we naively are too often, trying to win.

Where do they go

What then, is the null-hypothesis, on an individual basis for totalitarianism? The null hypothesis is one that if true, means you cannot accept your thesis. So like if your hypothesis is "all quadrupeds are cats" there's nothing to stop me from conducting experiment after experiment where I count cat or kitten legs to confirm my hypothesis. But a null hypothesis would be "some quadrupeds are not cats." for which a single observation of a dog or cow or goat or sheep or mouse etc. is sufficient to force me to accept the null-hypothesis and throw out my thesis.

For naive totalitarianism, and I'm grabbing at air here, but picture your 'enemy' the bad people, the worst people.

For me, it's a psychological archetype, hard to express but my most succinct attempt would be "wanton mediocrity" that's my enemy, basically the kind of society Joe from Netflix series "YOU" is trying to romantically infiltrate every season: vacuous, pretentious and assuming.

That's the demographic I am most tempted to round up and eliminate to make the whole world better, except being a psychological profile, may refer to 90% of the global population. 

If you are a socialist/communist it may be billionaires.

If you are a conservative it might be liberals or immigrants.

If you are a liberal it might be conservatives or bigots.

If you are a feminist it might be mediocre white men.

If you are a "manosphere" guy it might be blue haired lesbian feminists.

And when I say 'world' it need not be global, you may be advocating for 'greater diversity'* in a microcosm, like your organisation. I feel the test that falsifies naive totalitarianism is if you have some provision for your ostensible outgroup. 

*(Australian journalist Antoinette Lattouf was foisted on my attention when our national broadcaster ABC fired her for criticising Isreal and she successfully sued them for unfair dismissal. Her TEDxSydney talk provides a great example of how a strategy of 'advocating greater diversity' can be totalitarian. In her talk she refers to research findings from Deloitte indicating the benefits of diversity for productivity and performance, but her presentation omits the detail that these benefits of diversity are contingent on 'diversity of thought' aka heterodoxy - as such, you may achieve better performance by assembling teams containing a right-wing straight white male and a left-wing straight white male than assembling a team of South Asian, East Asian, West African, North African, Sub-Saharan African, Southern European, Northern European, Middle Eastern, South American, Central American and North American graduates from Columbia University liberal arts degrees.)

At first blush, I myself have no provisions for the "wanton mediocre" I just at some level idealise them being "out of the way" like if they weren't to enter Marathons because they overvalue them and underprepare for them, I'd be living in a better world where I don't have to submit to a ballot to see if I get a place or lose it to someone who does park run occasionally and maxes their training out at 10km for a 42.2km "prestige" event. But then multiply that out by the entire market.

I don't really know what the mediocre do and where they go once their wantonness has been thwarted. Its beyond my computational power.

At the same time, for my prejudice the provision is pretty simple - this demographic goes from overconsuming scarce resources, to consuming an appropriate amount of resources. They go from having 3 real properties to 1, they use their annual leave to rent a beach house a few hours drive away instead of flying halfway around the planet to visit the latest instagramable fetishised hotspot, they walk to the shops instead of driving, when they are driving they take the next exit instead of it being socially acceptable to do a 3-point turn anywhere, anytime etc.

To tie it in to my previous post about naive chauvinism - I am a cyclist. As a cyclist in Melbourne I find 'shared pathways' annoying, where a path typically with a line painted down the middle of it is available for both pedestrians and cyclists. I would like to see an apartheid where both groups are catered for, parallel paths - one for walkers and joggers and one for cyclists, skaters, roller-bladers as exists along the beaches of Port Phillip Bay.

I would accept the null-hypothesis regarding my own totalitarianism because I make provision for pedestrians, and my moral character may deserve no credit because recognizing that peds need infrastructure is just a practical reality. Every cyclist is also a pedestrian, you just subtract the bike, but you need a bike to be a cyclist. Peds will only stop crowding out and obstructing cyclists if they are given their own infrastructure.

But drivers, especially if car-brained are often totalitarian regarding cycling infrastructure. I am often surprised by the antipathy plebs feel for cyclists, like they are the greatest menace since St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. I come across totalitarian drivers that simply want cycling infrastructure destroyed so cyclists will stop cycling and get a car like a contributor to society.

That's naive totalitarianism - cars for all and fuck bike lanes. Now lets wade into less intuitive domains -

If for example, you are advocating for greater representation at an existing organisation, that is owned and operated by demographic majority of your locale and has historically hired people that look like the ownership, it is very counterintuitive that an egalitarian organisation would hire "Scot from Scotts College in Scotiaville" and you are instead like 'hiring needs to stop hiring Scot from Scotts College in Scotiaville, and start hiring Fatima from Happy Valley Technical Institute with Fatima's Syndrome' and the recruiting staff are like 'so should we interview Scot from Scotts College?" and you are like "sure, but the obstacle to equity is that we keep ignoring candidates immutable characteristics and focusing on systemic advantages like a) whether the person is already known to the organization through affiliation, and b) qualifications, experience and credentials from reputable institutions. He need not apply because we need greater representation so he isn't going to get the job, or if he does that'll be the exception because we need more Fatimas and Americas and Sun Moons and Carmens and Faiths, and we need more on the board and in the C-suite so Scot's career paths will be narrow..." and then I am asking "but where does Scot from Scotts College work? What does he pursue in life?" and if you're like "not my problem." I'm sorry, but that's naive totalitarianism, not social justice.

Then in that individual case, I'd have to reject the null hypothesis. You have succumbed to naive totalitarianism.

Now importantly, I pick the above example, because I suspect that it is a caricature of the left that people will recognize. I am not suggesting that campaigns to inject diversity in the workplace have been that effective in real world practice. If there's any basis for it, it may be slightly harder for young members of ethnic majorities to get work than maybe 20 years ago when nobody was even making overtures toward diversity and representation and you could just full blown run an old-boys club. And it is more likely that getting a job, even for graduates is simply harder for everyone because technology has made the art of recruitment harder and worse, not better and more efficient.

(It is an aside, but in my opinion the adverse impact of email has been a greater dampner on white male employability than social justice because a) it lowered the cost of applying to any given job. and more crucially b) it got rid of the mail room, effectively sawing off the entry level rungs of organisational ladders, meaning in the past you could get a job out of highschool and if you were bright and not a dickhead the company would notice you and give you some real responsibilities, now you need to get into a University course that simulates work experience and has a work integrated learning program where they place you into organisations the institution partners with, to do free labour in the hopes of getting hired.)

The point of the example is the "not my problem" part, which say, right-wing Christian nationalists may be doing in regards to refugees, shaking their fist and saying "you can't come here we're full!" and someone says "well they can't really stay where they were and live, so where do they go?" 

"Not my problem" means we reject the null hypothesis, you're a naive totalitarian because you are operating the software that came with your computer that seems to tend toward "there's good people and bad people and we just need to identify and exclude the bad people."

The Job(s) of a Functioning Democracy

Democracy is non-totalitarian, when it functions. 

I have recently been thinking of it this way:

I think back to my highschool cohort. I was in a graduating class of roughly 100 students. As an individual citizen, I was mostly focused on my own performance, my own results and my own future. The job of a head of state though, is to be concerned with the performance, results and future of everyone (at least short-term futures).

Where it was my job to complete my exams that allowed me to become a billionaire astronaut cowboy, I didn't have to think about what would happen to the students that did not do well, there is nothing stopping the individual student from putting blinkers on and charging through any peer pressure to enjoy some portion of their youth being a teenager with an unhealthy worldview that their options are: medical school or commit suicide.

But, and it's a little complicated because the timelines aren't in sync, the whole graduating (and non-graduating) class cohort becomes the workload of democratic leaders at some point.

First by timeline, its 2025 some percentage of students are finishing up high-school by quitting school, this in my jurisdiction includes people who are 16 and up, so not just those completing final year. There are also tertiary students that are finishing degrees that are oversupplied for the employment opportunities, the classic being Marine Biology but has at times been teachers (in 2025 they are in a shortage again). A large part of our education system, can be regarded as an analogue for 'Buy Now Pay Later' (BNPL) whereby the qualification/certification has little to no relevance to what that person will wind up doing.

Indeed, plenty who complete a degree in their early twenties, will retrain for a career transition in their late twenties proving 90s animation icon Daria prescient with her "my dream for the future is to not wake up at 40 in a cold sweat because I was forced to decide what to do with my life when I was a teenager." or something.

But basically the government is going to be faced at any given time with a bunch of people entering the workforce and a democracy is distinctly not totalitarian when functioning, if there's a bunch of young people in a regional urban center who finish highschool but do not go onto further study, the government generally scrambles to offer a tax incentive to a mining company or manufacturer to set up shop in that region so they can employ these people who are like "Bachelor degree...nah."

At the same time, in maybe a metropolitan urban center, you get a bunch of kids who do not want to be the kind of kid that doesn't at least go to University for a bachelors degree, not before you have a chance to lose touch with your peer group and so will do an arts degree at a third tier institution and maybe go into a depression that it isn't even one of the "big three" or whatever, but nevertheless complete it and it is the job of the government in a functional democracy to have call centres and hospitality and service industry jobs for these people until they can find themselves and retrain or whatever.

The government might also scramble to expand the legal liabilities of employers so they need to take on more employees to work "bullshit jobs" in administrative capacities, box-checking and duct taping and maybe even being goons to each other. Furthermore they may operate a tax-incentive program where a company effectively ends up with "consulting and training" coupons they can spend on third party service contracts that have almost nothing to do with the production of social goods by a firm but the firms have a choice between giving $200k to a consulting group that runs a fun off-site strategy session with no meaningful outcomes beyond a 'vibe' rather than a) fund healthcare, education, law & order, infrastructure etc through paying taxes as a % of profits nor b) distribute some of those profits to workers via significant wage increases which shareholders hate because it is an ongoing liability.

Strictly speaking a democratic government can also not function, they can put pressure on people to find their own jobs by making welfare or social security harder to obtain, they can cut public expenditure so the private sector doesn't have to compete with the public sector, they can neglect whole constituencies they just don't feel they can win over not at any price they are willing to pay via polarization and particularly by trying to create single issue voters and moving towards extremes that increase switching costs for voters.

So a democratic government may cease to function democratically and migrate toward totalitarianism by abolishing a law that creates a modest incentive not to discriminate in employment against people based on immutable qualities. Such that suddenly you have a bunch of recent migrants maybe who cannot find legal employment in industries that have low skill thresholds due to them receiving their education offshore. And these people also have their welfare cut off because the government isn't looking after this constituency to appease another. And some create jobs through entrepreneurial efforts but not everyone can start an Ethiopian restaurant near where the community can afford to live so many create income through crime which can then be pointed to and asserted "look, this crime can't be caused by too-high barriers to legal economic opportunities in this country, it must be the pigment of their skin or some other character flaw that leads to failure to assimilate."

But similarly and far more exceptionally, we can see maybe in industries like the arts a reversal of historic trends that sadly does nothing to repair an already determined past, but you have like a theatre company that just will not commission work from a historically dominant constellation of immutable qualities like (among playwrights) being a heterosexual or homosexual white man with merely ADHD. And you might go to the companies board of directors and find photos of that exact group expressing their commitment to Diversity and Equity and it doesn't mean the established parties are going to give up their careers in the name of diversity, but what can be done is putting a freeze on hiring/promoting anybody that looks like the board.

This is presented as what I believe to be a false dilemma between "equality of opportunity" and "equality of outcome" for functional "equality of opportunity" applied to the whole pipeline should in time lead to equality of outcome at the population level, the tricky thing (as the past decade has proved to be the tricky thing) is if you have a product to sell at the market, getting equal opportunity out of consumer preferences. Furthermore, we operate under a "Kitchen Nightmares" economy where the people who own the restaurant set the menu, and the people who mostly inherit wealth get to decide what risks are taken through 'entrepreneurship.'

To be clear, "equality of outcome" is not totalitarian, but "equality of outcome NOW" is totalitarianism, where you just force the outputs regardless of inputs. Furthermore, I have not heard people really tackle the full sentence of "equality of outcome for sexists and racists." or whether such character flaws mean you are simply excluded from provision, which is totalitarian. 

A functional democracy will give sexists and racists a vote, but this participation cannot lead to a "tyranny of the majority" so long as the democracy functions by having institutions that limit the powers of an elected government. This point is one I don't have any confidence an unedited vox populi segment on a satirical news show would establish as common sense.

Which is to say, that I think what is common sense is a notion that sexists and racists should be denied a vote to protect vulnerable people from racist and sexist laws being passed. What common sense is not I assert, is that sexists and racists can vote but passing racist and sexist laws is likely to be struck down by separate branches of government (as happened when Trump's "muslim ban" executive order was deemed unconstitutional) now, yes, non-naive totalitarians, ie. totalitarians will attempt to dismantle the institutions that limit totalizing, but a functional democracy has these institutions. It isn't a matter of one totalizing force of good overcoming another totalizing force of evil.

Poppers Paradoxical Remedy

20th century philosopher of science I feel clearly articulated the central challenge of running a democracy, or rather, an open and tolerant society.

A tolerant society cannot tolerate, intolerance. That's the paradox. The one totalizing exception for which there is historically insufficient will - which is to say you will probably see advocacy groups for more tolerant societies calling on young people to "call out their racist uncle" at thanksgiving/christmas a call that needs to be made because most of us would rather avoid conflict than stamp out totalitarian views, just like youtubers have to ask you to "smash that like button, hit subscribe and turn on notifications" like you don't know how to do it by now, but they keep saying it because people don't.

The big data set that relates the paradox of tolerance to naive totalitarianism is of course religion.

If you don't know me by now, I'm an atheist, and also, an igtheist (or ignostic) which is to say, if you tell me you believe in god, I will tell you that I don't know what you are talking about. My ignosticism likely even goes further, in that I don't believe generally that you know what you are talking about.

Where we will have common ground, is that I believe neither of us believes in "freedom of religion." For example, odds are neither of us preference or privelege the laws set down by the creator of the universe over the laws of the land. We don't really have freedom of religion, if you think god talks to you and told you to commit murder and then you murdered a bunch of people, most legal systems don't rule "well we think revelation is a perfectly legitimate epistemology, and we recognise that the opinions of a supernatural entity overrule the opinions of the state."

And you have numerous examples in day to day life, like migrants who come from religious communities where bigamy and polygamy are legal don't have (all of) their marriages recognised in destinations where such practices are illegal, nor child brides, and sometimes marriages to first cousins. Just as conversely one may potentially move to, or transit through a territory where the law doesn't recognize same-sex marriages.

But the latter example being evidence that some states don't have "freedom of religion" is not evidence that other states do. We can reframe this as only theocratic states are states where people are free to practice at least one religion, and nowhere else can anyone actually practice a religion. (Theocratic states like Iran also don't, I suspect, function very well, so a woman having her hair on display might result in morality police beating her to death, but a prominent politician may be known to do lines of cocaine off the buttocks of prostitutes and face no investigation nor legal repercussions.)

I'm most familiar with the Abrahamic religions, that have numerous sects that cannot be freely practiced by taking scripture seriously because any lucid reading of the scripture is one of intolerance, or perhaps some would be more comfortable with me putting it as a prescriptive holistic approach to life.

People get in a tizzy when people use "literal" to mean "figurative" and that prestigious dictionaries started documenting this popular usage. Yet, "freedom of religion" is in my opinion, similarly egregious because we actually mean "freedom from religion" at least in regards to monotheism.

It becomes hard now to not talk in pure truisms, for example what makes cultures multicultural is their intolerance of monocultures...duh! Democracy functions as a "utopia-thwarting institution" and its success derives from how frustrating it is in imposing compromise on people.

Institutions like "free speech" are explicitly utopia-thwarting. Southpark's Kyle Brovlovski is Jewish because his parents are Jewish, Stan Marsh is not Jewish because his parents aren't Jewish (though they gave Mormonism a one episode try) and they are best friends. When Eric Cartmen sings "Kyle's mom's a bitch" this is remarkably similar in emotional impact to reasonable criticism of any and all religion given that it remains among the strongest predictors of adult religiosity are things like geography, and the religion + religiosity of your parents.

As such, for many religious people, I quickly came to recognize that questioning core beliefs, or questioning at all elicited the same emotional responses in believers as telling them their mum's lasagne sucks, that classical music is boring etc. 2010's "Judeo-Christian" apologists Jordan Peterson and Tom Holland who make ambiguous "Wagner is better than it sounds" arguments for Christianity also leave me with an overwhelming sense that they defend Christianity more so for emotional reasons than the compulsion of reason, for them I suspect it is some profound familial connection that leads them to making the investment of time and energy into mental gymnastics to defend crusader impulses.

Freedom of religion + Abrahamic religions looks like the fucking crusades. Crusaders are people free to act out their religiosity fighting to the death over possession of the "holy land" in a conflict that continues right up to the present day - progress largely being that "we" have gotten the costs somewhat under control largely by not having the Church but the state collect taxes and while some of this may provide astronomical levels of funding to military conflicts in the middle east, some at least now gets spent on shit like education and healthcare, law enforcement, infrastructure, bailing out our boneheaded economic bubbles etc.

A father-son crusade however about three days before I write this sentence appear to have decided to take their religion seriously and went and shot dead 16 innocent people at Bondi Beach including children and I am not going to do justice to the human suffering inflicted. This is where someone like Sam Harris would be at pains to point out that lucid readings of scripture heavily favour that acts of terrorism like this are what it means to seriously believe a religion, I believe he expressed it in the truism "the problem with Islamic fundamentalism, are the fundamentals of Islam." Though I haven't been paying attention, but do not believe that he articulates this out equally to a character like Benjamin Netanyahu, who at the very least appears to entertain Jewish fundamentalism. 

But not to single out any one of the Abrahamic faiths, youtuber Prophet of Zod has a pretty accessible and comprehensive description about how most people pretend to be a believer albeit he is singling out American Christianity. There is also journalist A.J. Jacobs account of trying to live in accordance with the bible for a year "the year of living biblically" from which he offers an observation that:

A critique of fundamentalism. I became the ultra-fundamentalist. I found that fundamentalists may claim to take the Bible literally, but they actually just pick and choose certain rules to follow. By taking fundamentalism extreme, I found that literalism is not the best way to interpret the Bible.

So A.J would likely even lump 'fundamentalists' in as essentially doing what Zod's archetypal 'Mike' does.

Civilization's great achievement where and when it is achieved, is having the prevailing religious belief be one in a soupy-kind-of-god, that they do not so much believe in, but rather believes in them, taking the form of the society the believers grew up in, condoning its shared beliefs, shared rituals and shared practices voicelessly like the puddle takes the shape of the depression it sits in. 

In this way, modern secular societies like Australia, Canada, EU and UK, Japan, Korea and according to CCTV4 China also, people are free to practice a narrower bandwidth of available religiosity that excludes totalising religiosity. But we are not free (nor should we be) to take seriously the idea that the ultimate authority revealed to some guy the ultimate truth as to how to live one's life in any way where a literal interpretation of what it fucking says is any defence in a court of law. 

All that is permitted is 'exegesis' which is a critical interpretation of the text, elstwise in the 21st century we have to open up debate again in deference to freedom of religion as to whether all forms of slavery, genocide and sexism are permissible and furthermore given that we have multiple ultimate truths to choose from, we'd be obliged to duke it out. 

Bringing this back to Popper's paradox of tolerance, we used to have religious totalitarianism. Catholic Spain exiled the Jews from the Iberian peninsula and the Ottoman's took them in. Prior to that the Kingdom of England in 1209 issued "the Edict of Expulsion" the first European territory to expel Jews from its lands and resettlement didn't occur until the 1650s. (Shakespeare managed to write 'The Merchant of Venice' when Jews couldn't openly practice in his entire lifetime, and possibly himself and probably his entire audiences at the Globe had never met a Jew.)

In the meantime, Catholics and Protestants duked it out brutally and we also had dark episodes of taking religion as a serious totality like Imperial Japan treating Hirohito as a living god, the Irish troubles having colonialism divide along religious lines, Jonestown massacre, the Heaven's Gate cult suicide etc. through to Bin Laden's attack on the World Trade Center twin towers ending the end of history and wetting appetites around the world for the naive totalitarianism that fuels the crusades.

Civilization, if it is anything, is the process of building institutions that assume the answers are unknown and that carry out with some modicum of efficiency and finger-crossing a systemic thwarting of all attempts by everyone to fix everything with their myopic conception of what needs doing.

Good guys and Bad guys at Sports

Sports is a domain where we can agree, that sports are not as consequential as say, military conflict. Sports seldom rack up a death-toll, disrupt global supply chains, destroy wealth, drive rapid technological innovation and bankrupt nation-states. 

When I started writing this section, I thought I was going to make a pretty straightforward comparison between the totalitarian attitudes of "indoor kids" vs "outdoor kids" how either can fall into a totalizing trap of seeing the other as defective somehow in a way that perhaps grows up to map onto the extremes of the right and left political spectrums.

Inadvertantly though, I found an example too perfect of "indoor kids" being totalitarian. I chose a video from "Books and Cats" purely from the name of the channel and largely for aesthetic reasons to suggest a reductive stereotype about someone in high school that maybe resented the celebration of athletes without having any appreciation of the merits of competitive sports.

This stereotype straw-man I was then going to counter with Kobe Bean Bryant:

The point being, at the elite level sports are made great by exclusion.

Let me put it this way, a little kid starts out on a balance bike or training wheels. Eventually though, the most of us that can ride a bike, put our faith in inertia and start riding a bike.

Now let's posit another level - which is somewhere between the age of 12~15 kids who ride bikes, need to basically get the fuck off the footpath and start riding on the road, which these days have more bike lanes and cycling infrastructure. 

In adulthood proper, you have to face at some point cycling at night with lights, and cycling in the rain if you want to use cycling for commuting.

While there is something to be said for building cycling specific infrastructure to make cycling safer and more convenient and encourage more people to do it, there will always be a hardcore elite of cycling that wants to ride their bikes on intercity roads, in national parks, off of cliffs.

And at the elitemost of sports, we are going to find our most elite athletes who want literally the opposite of a safe and inclusive environment. They are there to try and perform under the most adverse conditions of physical and psychological punishment, in order to get more joy.

Hence Kobe describes being bullied by big kids Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman as "This was fun".

This is the kind of Gen-X feminism counterargument to naive totalitarianism, that we have people who want to play not just the game, but the meta-game which includes cheating, includes double-standards (in the NBA it is pretty much an established fact that star players get favourable calls) but to what end? What social good is produced from these oddities who want to be free to be bullied?

It is hard for me to convey, I can only make a subjective argument. We know Kobe wound up having one of the most storied careers, with only Tim Duncan rivalling him and Michael Jordan clearly eclipsing him. But I'd submit just this short highlight reel as evidence that Kobe's game expanded the frontiers of human possibility.

Fancy footwork to spin around defenders and bank in shots will probably be lost on someone who compares it to splitting the atom or unifying physics. Just consider that homo sapiens have been "anatomically modern" for 125,000 years. Approximately one of them has moved as Kobe did, but it is unlikely he will be the last. His innovation isn't quantum either, it didn't come out of nowhere, we have beyond Kobe's own book, literal hours of testimony as to Kobe's "mamba mentality" his competitive obsession with basketball, initially imitating Jordan, then changing his shot based on Tiger Woods changing his golf stroke, changing his shoes after watching soccer-players low-top shoes not result in greater ankle injuries, learning low-post moves from Hakeem Olajuwan etc. etc. 

Fundamentally though, in opposition to totalitarian pedagogy that wants to create safe, fun and inclusive environments, what allowance is there for a kid who wants to go straight from high school into the NBA when he isn't the tallest, isn't the fastest, isn't the strongest etc. his entire career, he just wants to go up against the toughest competition and take it extremely seriously.

Here we are presented with a paradox of inclusivity, we cannot include a diverse range of human personality, if we do not have exclusive spaces for those whose self-actualization, for whom living their truth, means they need to go up against only the .001% of the athletically elite. 

By definition, competitive sports need institutions that say to most people 'sorry kid, you can't come in here' and the alternative, the work-around is uncompetitive sports.

But alas, this is totalitarian, you are making no provision for the people who love competition, who love competitive sports. Essentially insisting that in Utopia they must function with a hand break on.

Books and Fig-leafing

Inertia and not nostalgia is why I generally go back to high school politics, because pretty much all of my life experience suggests that while it isn't ironclad, the way to bet is that most people's politics don't get more sophisticated than what they survived off in high-school. This is also a series on naive psychology, so of course if people are still thinking this way at 40 and thought this way at 5 then we can trawl through high school for examples.

High school for most of the 20th century, and at least the early 21st century forced kids to do sports. A few kids are really good at it, most are mediocre and a few kids are bad at it, possessing little cardio-vascular fitness or hand-eye coordination or reflexes.

20th Century Cinema, dominated in the Anglo-sphere by hollywood popularised the concept of "the jock" typically a local football hero, who was celebrated by the community typically for being the biggest fish in a small pond where even on the silver screen, jocks are rarely depicted as having any real prospect of going pro. Where the "nerds" in such movies often have very bright prospects for their future earning potential, but are not celebrated, not desired, but marginalised.  

Giving us a dichotomy of "outdoor" kids, the jocks and cheerleaders, and "indoor kids" the drama kids, the band kids and the bookworms.

Because of the aforementioned marginalisation of nerds, or indoor kids that prevailed in popular culture. Now drawing on my own superficial bigotry, to find an example of totalitarianism coming from the "indoor kids" I just judged a youtube channel by, not so much its cover, but it's name "books and cats" the odds that this channel would spend any time discussing Kobe Bryant's sporting legacy seemed small. It also suggested someone proudly leaning in to a bookish stereotype. 

I had just picked like the most recently published video to watch, but this then got Books and Cats into Youtube's proprietary and super sophisticated algorithm that uses advanced technology to show me more of what I had just watched. So I came across a video titled "The Roald Dahl Edits are fine, actually" from which I will now excerpt the transcript and I will embolden the totalising language within. 

But this form of aggression, this reaction  that we see from GB news et al, is not ok; and I’d bet it has very little to do with  protecting free speech, or protecting history.

It’s censorship in brute form: it’s a bid  for control from those who shout loudest,   who mock, who bully, who punch down,  and who do so to silence the rest.

You might be left thinking: but how do  we know when censorship has gone too far?  I think it’s easy to be like ‘surely everything  offends somebody, how can we possibly police this?’ And yes, think of a thing and there’s  probably someone out there who is offended by   it. But to rest on that argument, to do nothing  when people say or do hateful and hurtful things, to make no changes, to refuse to evolve, is a form  of passivity that means no progress is ever made.

There are some nursery rhymes that were  changed so long ago that we- so many of  us don't remember what their original words were. 

"Eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Catch a tiger by the toe."  It wasn't originally tiger it was [the] n-word.  And there are a number of these classic Rhymes that in their original iterations would  be very offensive to the Contemporary ear. Now, she raises this point, and he brushes it off  and it’s never revisited. But it’s an important concern to raise. Look back at the kinds of things  children said, did, played with fifty years ago, and there are things that, I would bet, most  people would agree are not appropriate today.

Ultimately, I’m in two minds about how much  the Dahl edits matter. How effective they will be at making children feel more included, I don’t  know. But language is important, and making moves towards a more inclusive and diverse literary  canon in small ways is important work, even   though it might not seem as urgent as tackling  other, louder, more obvious issues of inequality.

Puffin seems to have closed the case, and the  rage seems to be dying down. But I hope that   whether you agree or disagree about the value of  the edits, and whatever you believe about editing literature in general, you can avoid this kind of  nonsense, and engage in a respectful conversation.   But what about your relationship to Roald  Dahl? I think it’s likely that, for some of us, part of the anger over the edits comes from  a passionate love of the books. What do we do if something we love, have loved since  childhood, is deemed outdated or bigoted?

 Now, I don't include this to take a stance on the Roald Dahl edits in the specific, it is included to bolster my claim that totalitarian attitudes are fairly innate, to the point of naive. 

Generally, I'd say I'm unconvinced by fig-leafing/bowdlerization of texts. This is largely because I am tentatively persuaded that media effects are weak. Certainly relatively weak. And Books and Cats in my example, incidently provides an example - Eenie Meenie was bowdlerized before I ever heard it. I learned much later what "Tiger" was a substitute for at a point where I was no longer a child and no longer used the rhyme to determine who would start off as "it" at recess.

Other problematized cultural artefacts had also been figleafed, such that at the turn of the century, when I first came across the dubbed cartoon of Japanese serialized comic "One Piece" I was surprised to learn from wikipedia that the US company that dubbed the first few seasons for English speaking audiences, not only changed the character Sanji's cigarette to a lollypop for all his scenes, but recoloured black characters that Japanese artists like One Piece creator Eichiro Oda and Dragonball creator Akira Toriyama to pick just two of the bestselling creators, but by no means the worst offenders. 

But just because ethno-nationalist state Japan was 50 years behind US, UK, Canada and Australia in retiring the gollywog aesthetic, I'm going to guess that despite this "important work" being begun "so long ago many of us don't remember" the idea that it is "important work" can somehow sit with concerns that racism and bigotry are on the rise.

Jeepers that took too long, the stuff I've bolded in the transcript excerpt, are broadly just assertions, totalizing language. As is the video title itself "...are fine, actually" the video essayist, is simply asserting that the edits are fine. 

The essayist, takes a strong principled stance, but they don't argue for it, they don't justify it. I have linked to the source video-essay if you feel so inclined to check it out, but the essay proceeds like a later subject in an educational course, where it is presumed you've already done the classes where we learned why that principled stance is justified.

The oldest videos on the channel begin about 3 years ago, and start with a video titled "Who was John Keats?" Keats was a Romantic Poet who died age 25 and shot to fame posthumously. I don't think Keats originated any ideas about literary criticism, media effects, post modernism, post structuralism and techniques or methodologies like 'close reading.'

Mercifully, Books and Cats, which I am at pains to remind, I am picking on merely as an example of "indoor kid" totalitarianism; turns out to not have many videos, so with a shallow reading of the 47 video titles at writing, I strongly suspect that an actual survey of the channel content would never establish the legitimacy of the project asserted in the Roald Dahl video.

In other words, the video essay is an essay intended for "us" an internal communication. It makes no effort to avoid Hitchen's Razor - "that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence" it is for me, particularly totalitarian in that its assertions to me, simply appeal to what "everybody knows" and I myself have little more than "vibes" as to what Books and Cats assumes everybody knows.

In the fact that the essayist feels no obligation to establish the case for all the assertions in bold, but holds them to be self-evident, presupposes the counterpart to assertions - dismissal. I can make a prediction that anyone who might post as a comment an argument that bigots should be free to express their opposition to fig-leafing Roald Dahl can simply be dismissed as some kind of subhuman. My perusal of the first 20 or so top comments indicated that the channel is likely simply a silo or echo chamber. This in turn is likely to be due to Youtube channels being capitalist artefacts.

Rebecca Watson is a youtuber that has had some profile (particularly in "New Atheist" circles) for some time and strikes me as a fairly "indoor" type, she also strikes me as reasonably totalitarian in her views, as in there's us and them, we the reasonable good people and them the bigoted idiots. I learn stuff from Rebecca and find her unpleasant, but often worth listening to. Not as an authority, but as a distinct commentator who can help me approach understanding things better.

Anyway, here's an excerpt from a video she made that I feel also hits my vibes of totalitarianism:

I don't often talk about trans women in sports because I just don't think there's much to say besides this is a stupid wedge issue involving a handful of trans people playing a game and literally no one should care about it. But people do keep caring about it against my will, likely because transphobes know it's a stupid wedge issue that they can constantly bring up and trick people into thinking they should care about it.

For me, again though the video is about the IOCs ruling on whether transwomen can compete in women's Olympic competitions, I just pick it out actually because while the subject of the video is a criticism of the IOCs bigoted position against trans women, and argues that by permitting trans men to compete against women the IOC is endangering cis women (I haven't watched the whole video) I pull the quote as an example of a totalitarian diminishing of the importance of sport. Again, this is merely the vibe I get from Rebecca, that she is someone who perhaps just thinks sports are stupid, a past time of them, the "outdoor kids" who perhaps, pray to God for success in football.

As a sports fan, it is trivial for me to recognise that Rebecca's strong assertion that "literally no one should care about it" is a parochial totalitarian statement of wilful ignorance. Now someone like Rebecca may feel forced by her own wording, to condescend to comment on the sporting world only insofar as it overlaps with a form of bigotry, but to me her statement is the equivalent of asserting that the "gather-step" rule in basketball is a stupid issue and literally no one should care about it. 

Sports I would argue, are often an exercise in "simulated-realism" as in, what they mostly tap into is a simulation of war, be it chess, football, polo, basketball. Clearly, many sports across the world emerged as means by which to practice martial skills. Wrestling, discuss, shot put, caber tossing, chariot racing, horse racing, archery, foot races, rowing etc.

However, it's a continuum, a continuum sport and war are both on. If you didn't know, war has rules. Mustard Gas is banned, you can't attack the red cross, there are knives that are band because the wounds they inflict can't be stitched up. As at writing, news stories are being generated daily by the tweets of an ignoramus who doesn't realise he is threatening Iran with war crimes like blowing up water infrastructure.

We've already established, that Kobe operated outside the rules of basketball, and he loved going up against world champions Rodman and Jordan who also were not above operating outside the rules of basketball. All three are pre the "gather step" era, fans of the prior era are often dismissed as "old heads" for complaining about the "gather step" rule change resulting in NBA highlight videos where we are supposed to celebrate a play where Lebron or Ant or Harden take 7 steps as they drive to the rim. But most of what I see are people posing an argument that taking 7 steps is unimpressive on the same basis as someone breaking the 100m sprint record by riding a drag motorcycle is unimpressive, and pointing out that Michael Jordan and Dominique Wilkins didn't even travel in the NBA Slam Dunk contests, only taking two steps, no "gather" step.

Sports are not easy to understand, Chess has some of the least "fuzzy" rules, but you know there was the whole thing about anal beads being used to cheat, it is really, really hard to define the boundaries of any game as often spectators, media coverage etc. can have an impact on the outcome of games. Basketball's rules are quite "fuzzy" in that its well documented that a player's fame impacts a referees reluctance to enforce the rules, referees have been caught up in betting scandals, then just the fact that the referees have to first run up and down the court while staying out of the way and putting themselves in a position to see things. 

All the debate serves the purpose of bounding that fuzziness so as the sport of basketball doesn't simply become war, where all is supposedly fair. 

So I would argue, that the gather step is an issue that not-literally no one but in fact, some people, should care about. Now I assert, that my argument and Rebecca's totalitarian statement cannot both be true at the same time. 

A friend of mine said that the trans women in sports issue came down to a debate as to why female competitions exist. That same friend caused me to realise that because of this issue, functionally a wedge or not, that I understood the nature of gender dysphoria less than I had assumed I had.

"Indoor" totalitarianism, manifests in being unjustifiably dismissive and often even resentful of sports. Even if you regard sports as an insignificant waste of time however, the trans women in sports issue doesn't permit a neutral stance on the issue - at least from the position that sports don't matter. Because if sports don't matter and nobody should care, that also works as an argument to maintain the status quo and exclude trans women from women's competition, as dates back to when medical gender affirming procedures were basically not available, nor was socially transitioning a locally accepted social convention. 

Full disclosure, I haven't watched the entirety of Rebecca Watson's editorial on the IOC decision news story, I am just betting it is "indoor" totalitarian based on the opening statements, I could be wrong though, Watson's video on Dunning-Kruger really got in depth into the science and argued persuasively that I was indeed among the many that did not understand the Dunning-Kruger effect. 

I'm betting Watson will simply argue that the IOC should have made a different decision based on asserting her values, there may be arguments, but they will be unfounded and possibly incoherent because it is proceeding from that indoor totalitarian view that sports are games that literally nobody should care about, unless I guess they are "tricked" into caring about them.

And I would bet, that Rebecca will conclude her video, without a coherent statement that she does not care about the issue, but in fact cares enough to favour one outcome over the other.

And to put it in context, as at writing Watson's video has almost 31k views. Former NBA Point Guard Jeff Teague's reaction video to the Charlotte Hornets vs. Miami Heat play-in elimination game published three days ago has 56k views. Sports ARE HUGE and as significant as literature and music at least. 

So at least to my mind, of course people are being naively totalitarian when they just assert their preference and make no allowance that it might be perfectly valid to not share that preference, whether it be someone who believes that sports are good for kids and books corrupting influences, or the opposite.

Conclusion

Years ago, at the start of what I'd argue was just a disastrous decade for the left, I got curious as to a disparity between woke and anti-woke memes. It was fairly easy to identify where anti-woke people got their arguments for, the public "intellectuals" they leaned on, and often reproduced uncritically and verbatim were subjects of media-obsessions - most notably Jordan Peterson, but also Sam Harris, the Weinstein brothers, Douglas Murray, Bill Burr, Dave Chappelle, John Cleese, Johnathan Haidt etc. 

Particularly in the early days however, woke just seemed to be memes that were proliferating, and could come from anywhere. There was just jargon that cropped up, an abundance of it: mansplaining, manspreading, trigger warning, safe spaces, privilege, emotional labour, decolonization, identity, non-binary, gender-non-conforming, platforming, deplatforming, #metoo, cancel culture etc etc. 

Etiquette cropped up, was observed, but almost nobody could argue. In fact questioning many of these memes was pretty much taboo. They were adopted as a fait accompli.

As someone who pretty much never bothers to even try to get my finger on the pulse, I asked friends who enthusiastically adopted the etiquette if they could tell me who these ideas were coming from. I wanted to hear the best arguements for them, as while some I understood others I could not differentiate in practice from simply being ad-hominem, and often, functionally racist.

One of my friends told me to check out "The David Packman Show" which I did, and like, this would have been back in 2017 at the latest. It wasn't what I was looking for. Transparently, David Packman was 'some guy' not a public intellectual, running a DIY news channel that just had a fairly woke editorial position. What I saw was a guy explaining complex news stories with no particular qualifications, sitting behind a mocked up news desk with no real oversight. 

So I told the friend that recommended David Packman to me, that it reminded me of Alex Jones. I don't think I'm exaggerating that this description BLEW HIS FUCKING MIND, and not in a glass shattering way where he noticed what I noticed. More that he couldn't see any parallels at all between alt-right Alex Jones and far-left David Packman.

To be sure, and to be fair, there are certainly meaningful differences between Packman and Jones. I do not anticipate ever learning that Packman will have to pay damages and go bankrupt as a result of spreading baseless conspiracy theories.

Pakman is likely better educated than Alex Jones, with a BS in economics and communication and an MBA. These however, do not confer upon him any real expertise on any particular topic. (By this I mean, I have a BBu in economics and finance, I am not an expert in economics and finance) My friend that could not believe I would ever compare Jones and Packman, I feel is exhibiting that naive totalitarianism - specifically, an appeal to what everybody knows.

That was around a decade ago, this year, a decade later I was at a friends place. I was sitting in front of a rainbow flag painted on a wall in their back yard. Hanging from the trees in their yard were pennants coloured rainbow and others that were chequered strung all about. That friend and I are both very educated adults, and it struck me that like my friend who couldn't see any parallels between Alex Jones and David Pakman, this friend likely couldn't see any parallels between living where they lived and displaying proudly LGBTQIA+ flags, and where others choose to live and proudly displaying Australian flags, or the US stars and stripes flags.

Then in something that gives me hope, Youtube upchucked a clip from comedian Joe DeRosa titled "Be Tolerant and Shut Up":

"It's real easy to be tolerant when everybody around you thinks exactly the same way you do." and it speaks to my adult experience. 

It's very very very hard to not be totalitarian. The instinct that life is about being good, and not being bad is strong. But it's when you are smashing the face in with a cinder-block of somebody you recognized was bad, because I don't know they don't wash behind their ears or they didn't bow to a hat on a pole in a public square, and you run out of breath causing a brief moment of lucidity, that you might fathom the cognitive dissonance that whatever they did that was 'bad' bashing their face in with a cinder block as an exercise in paralegal justice is 'badder' and that's the peril of just sticking with our naive totalitarianism.