The agony and the ecstacy: the carnage and the madness

With some sanity mixed in from my travels around the internet

From one parasitic ideology to the next

From neoliberalism to Trumpery

Grok: finally realises I’m talking about Friedrich, not Selma Hayek

Trumpery: Noun: “practices or beliefs that are superficially or visually appealing but have little real value or worth”.

The great French liberal intellectual Raymond Aron regarded Hayek’s libertarian neoliberalism as a kind of ‘inverse Marxism’. Just as Marxists would preach that a little free enterprise would poison true socialism, Hayek suggested in in 1944 book The Road to Serfdom that pretty much any state intervention put one on a slippery slope to totalitarianism. This sat uneasily with Hayek’s concession that there was a case for some social safety net to protect people from complete destitution.

In Hayek’s ideal world governments would not rule in a ‘discriminatory’ way. You know — with progressive taxation taking a greater share of the rich’s income or wealth than the poor. If that’s not a high road to totalitarianism, I don’t know what is. Woke gone mad I’d say.

And what if the rank inequality and instability that markets had produced undermined people’s support for the market? Hayek’s response was to say that democracy was all very well, but it wasn’t as important as liberalism — by which he meant economic liberalism. Aron was always more alive to the prior question of the freedom of a community from foreign rule, a rather salient subject for the post June 1940 French. He was exasperated by Hayek’s failure to see his point. In his review of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty in 1961 he wrote this:

The ideal of a society in which everyone would choose their gods and values ​​cannot spread until individuals are educated for collective life. Hayek's philosophy assumes, by definition, the results that philosophers of the past considered the primary objects of political action. To leave everyone a private sphere of decision and choice, it is still necessary that all or most of them want to live together and recognize the same system of ideas as true, the same formula of legitimacy as valid. Before society can be free, it must be.¹

And here we are at the beginning of Trump 2.0 which does something similar. It takes state capacity as a given and slashes away. You can do this in the market because you may hack away your own firm’s capabilities, but there will always be firms not so far from your neck of the woods who will sell it back to you. And if you go broke, others will have taken a less swashbuckling approach so whatever you’ve lain waste to can be quickly rebuilt. Not so state capacity. As Martin Wolf wrote this week:

In an important series of articles, Valuing the Deep State, Stanford’s Francis Fukuyama examines why the evisceration of the state will prove so destructive. Fukuyama has devoted much of the past two decades to explaining that “a high-capacity, professional, and impersonal state is critical to the success of any society”, including notably modern liberal democracies. This view is one that many Americans abhor: they see the state — or simply “government” — as the enemy. But anybody who has worked on economic development, as I have done, knows that without a competent, professional and neutral public service nothing in society really works. The more sophisticated and complex a modern society and economy becomes, the more true this is. As Fukuyama rightly notes, the extraordinary success of east Asian economies is largely due to the fact that they had understood how to run such a state long before the west.

Building things is hard and slow: breaking them is fast and easy

When you think you’re in a conversation and you’re actually in a war?

How’s that Maginot Line going then?

Section of the Maginot Line, 1940. A good idea (as far as it went).

The stunning essay “The Digital Maginot Line”. The kind of thing you read and realise how naïve you’ve been all these years. And the kicker is that this was written in 2018.

Political discourse is about understanding the other and persuasion, but wars are not.

There is a war happening. We are immersed in an evolving, ongoing conflict: an Information World War in which state actors, terrorists, and ideological extremists leverage the social infrastructure underpinning everyday life to sow discord and erode shared reality. The conflict is still being processed as a series of individual skirmishes – a collection of disparate, localized, truth-in-narrative problems – but these battles are connected. The campaigns are often perceived as organic online chaos driven by emergent, bottom-up amateur actions when a substantial amount is, in fact, helped along or instigated by systematic, top-down institutional and state actions. This is a kind of warm war; not the active, declared, open conflict of a hot war, but beyond the shadowboxing of a cold one.

We experience this as a state of continuous partial conflict. The theatre opportunistically shifts as geopolitical events and cultural moments present themselves, but there is no sign of abatement — only tactical evolution as the digital platforms that serve as the battlespaces introduce small amounts of friction via new security checks and feature tweaks. As governments become increasingly aware of the problem, they each pursue responses tailored to the tactics of the last specific battle that manifested in their own digital territory; in the United States, for example, we remain focused on Election 2016 and its Russian bots. As a result, we are investing in a set of inappropriate and ineffective responses: a digital Maginot Line constructed on one part of the battlefield as a deterrent against one set of tactics, while new tactics manifest elsewhere in real time.

Like the original Maginot Line, this approach is about as effective a defense as a minor speed bump. …

There are state-sponsored trolls, destabilizing societies in some countries, and rendering all information channels except state media useless in others. They operate at the behest of rulers, often through military or intelligence divisions. Sometimes, as in the case of Duterte in the Philippines, these digital armies focus on interference in their own elections, using paid botnets and teams of sockpuppet personas to troll and harass opponents, or to amplify their owner’s candidacy. Other times, the trolls reach beyond their borders to manipulate politics elsewhere, as was the case with Brexit and the U.S. presidential election of 2016. Sometimes, as in Myanmar, elections aren’t the goal at all: there, military-run digital teams incited a genocide.

There are decentralized terrorists such as ISIS, who build high-visibility brands while asynchronously recruiting the like-minded. These digital recruiters blanket the internet with promises of glory and camaraderie via well-produced propaganda, then move the receptive into encrypted chat apps to continue the radicalization. The recruits pledge allegiance to the virtual caliphate in Facebook posts before driving trucks into pedestrian plazas IRL. …

Combatants evolve with remarkable speed, because digital munitions are very close to free. In fact, because of the digital advertising ecosystem, information warfare may even turn a profit. There’s very little incentive not to try everything: this is a revolution that is being A/B tested. The most visible battlespaces are our online forums — Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — but the activity is increasingly spreading to old-school direct action on the streets, in traditional media outlets, and behind closed doors, as state-sponsored trolls recruit and manipulate activists, launder narratives, and instigate protests.

One thing that all of these groups have in common is a shared disdain for Terms of Service; the rules that govern conduct and attempt to set norms in platform spaces are inconveniences to be disregarded, at best. Combatants actively and systematically circumvent these attempts at digital defenses, turning the very idea of them into a target of trolling: the norms are illegitimate, they claim. The rules are unfair, their very existence is censorship!

The combatants want to normalize the idea that the platforms shouldn’t be allowed to set rules of engagement because in the short term, it’s only the platforms that can.

Meanwhile, regular civilian users view these platforms as ordinary extensions of physical public and social spaces – the new public square, with a bit of a pollution problem. Academic leaders and technologists wonder if faster fact checking might solve the problem, and attempt to engage in good-faith debate about whether moderation is censorship. There’s a fundamental disconnect here, driven by underestimation and misinterpretation. The combatants view this as a Hobbesian information war of all against all and a tactical arms race; the other side sees it as a peacetime civil governance problem.

“Carnival In Rome, The Feast Of Moccoletti” by Ippolito Caffi

The ultimate betrayal? Surely not.

Marco Rubio. Baby faced schmuck crashes out of 2016 primaries, tries to tweet like Trump (see an earlier newsletter), becomes the Secretary of State and hands chunks of Europe over to the invader.

Francis Fukuyama gets the memo

I was wrong. I was wrong about Donald Trump in 2017 and I was wrong about him in 2025. In 2017 I thought he’d be more like Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan gave the job 8 honest hours a day and a few big things he wanted to achieve and left the rest to the professionals. I thought Donald 1.0 might be a bit more chaotic, but a bit like that — with about 5 hours’ work a day (probably less honest). Anyway, it wasn’t like that.

This time around I thought he’d fall out with Musk as quickly as he fell out with those in his White House the last time. Perhaps he will, but my new explanation is that he’s mesmerised by power and wealth and so he likes to have the TechBros in his corner. It’s also clear that there’s a fair bit of thinking that’s gone into these first days. Hitler understood the need for speed both in what others were taking as peacetime, and in war.

I’m still not sure of Fukuyama’s last claim, that Trump is “a very purposeful individual”, but his administration certainly is. At least so far.

I’m struck by the degree to which the mainstream media is still living in the Trump 1.0 world of 2017-2020, using words like “chaotic” or “transactional” to describe the new administration’s behavior.

“Chaotic” may have been an appropriate moniker for actions in the first term, when for example the Muslim ban had to be retracted due to poor drafting. But Trump 2.0 has been anything but chaotic. He is executing a deliberate strategy for implementing policies he promised on issues like immigration and tariffs. While he may be bluffing tactically, imposing tariffs on Canada and Mexico and then delaying them, this is part of a bargaining strategy.

Similarly, the personnel actions undertake by Musk, DOGE, and OMB Director Russ Vaught are based on the Project 2025 playbook that has been in the making for four years. Some of the individual actions like the federal funding pause were poorly executed, but we are seeing a deliberate rollout of an effort to destroy the “deep state.” This is not chaos, though it may be perceived as such by those on the receiving end.

Similarly with the word “transactional.” This is used to imply that many of Trump’s actions are not tied to a coherent world view or set of values. This is true in some sense, but here too there is an underlying coherence: Trump’s actions are deeply selfish, either in terms of his personal power and interests, or else represent a kind of classic 19th century form of realism, in which great powers simply seek to maximize their power regardless of values or ideology. I wrote about this in my last post.

In the runup to last November’s election, many normie Republicans were arguing that Trump’s first term wasn’t that bad, and voted for him on that basis. In his second term, he is demonstrating that he is a radical of a sort that we have not witnessed before in American politics, as if we had somehow elected Vladimir Lenin. So stop using words like “chaotic” and “transactional” to describe a very purposeful individual.

Another deadly category. Escalating self-righteousness

Trumpers Are Not Entitled to Respect

The agony and the ecstacy: the carnage and the madness

One of the ways Musk has given his AI Grok a leg up in its competition with other AIs is that it doesn’t refuse to respond to requests to draw controversial topics. At least so far, it’s not trying to prevent MuskRats appearing.

An excellent post from Don Moynihan at Can We Still Govern? with numerous stories outlining the carnage — and the madness. I’m just extracting two. Don himself is only sifting through the swashbuckling telling a few representative stories.

Don’t fire the guys taking care of the nukes

Let me note that I feel like this lesson should not be necessary. We should not need to spell this one out. One measure of the collapse of the Soviet Union was that they could no longer afford to keep staff to secure nuclear warheads. Why would the US voluntarily downgrade it’s own capacity to manage its nuclear arsenal? And yet, DOGE fired 1 in 5 federal staff that manage the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

Have you heard about the National Nuclear Security Administration before? Probably not. It’s one of those jobs that we hopefully never need to think about, because if we do that means something has gone badly wrong. But it’s also one of those jobs that someone needs to ensure is staffed appropriately to make sure something does not go badly wrong. As a citizen, its fine if you are not aware of NNSA, but bear in mind that when the right attacks wasteful bureaucracy, these sort of invisible agencies performing important tasks are some of what they are talking about.

Apparently DOGE does not know much about the NNSA either. To be fair, when you have zero experience of government, why should you? But if you have zero experience of government, you should also probably not be in the position of firing 300 of the guys who take care of the nukes. NNSA managers were given 200 characters—about the length of a social media post—to explain why the jobs of their employees mattered. The vast majority of these pleas were denied by Trump officials who simply did not understand the positions. CNN reported that the fired staffers included “staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.” Some staff oversees emergency response plans at nuclear weapons site, or were involved in preventing rogue nations from accessing nuclear materials. Dismissal emails said “your further employment would not be in the public interest."

After enough members of Congress got upset, the firings were rescinded. Just one problem. DOGE made the firings effective the day they were received (no notice, not severance), immediately forcing employees to leave and shutting down access to government emails. DOGE did not have contact information to tell NNSA employees they were unfired. One unfired employee who was tracked down told reporters:

I will be honest, I intend to keep looking for work. I will go back, but as soon as I find another role, I’ll be leaving…[I have] no faith I will keep my job.

Given their treatment, another employee asked: "why would anybody want to take these jobs?"

Turns out if you treat employees like garbage, they don’t always want to come back to work for you. …

Don’t fire the guys collecting the money

Governments can’t function without revenue, so ensuring that the agency that collects taxes can do its job is pretty fundamental to maintaining state capacity. Under Biden, the IRS had received long-awaited and much needed funds that allowed it to rebuild after a period of sustained downsizing, and was becoming more effective.

The IRS represented a very simple test for the credibility of DOGE. Was it really interested in efficiency and state capacity? If so, you support the tax enforcement, the biggest return on investment in government, generating somewhere between $5-9 for every additional $1 spent on enforcement.

Or did DOGE want to minimize parts of the state that bothered billionaires?

We have our answer. In the middle of tax season, the IRS was told to lay off thousands of workers hired as part of the rebuilding project.

Part of the DOGE hype is that after they fire everyone, they will figure out better ways to do the job using, uh, AI and such. But there is no second act where it gets better. They don’t have a plan to fix what they are breaking because they don’t understand or care about the damage they are doing. Breaking government is the point. It is not as if DOGE has some magical IRS plan up their sleeve. There is no plan.

In addition to making it less likely that the wealthy will have to pay taxes, the other attraction to the IRS is its data. DOGE has been hoovering up all sorts of data across government. No single entity has ever had this type of centralized access to government data. But the IRS stands alone. It is the holy grail of government data, incredibly tightly controlled. It requires an Act of Congress to share this data even within government. But when DOGE employees landed at Treasury “the main thing DOGE is asking for is extensive access to the tax agency’s information and internal systems. They’re just trying to snap up data right now." This includes access to personal bank information that political appointees, including even IRS commissioners, traditionally do not have access to because of the concern of abuse of such data. Now white nationalists who traffic in far-right hate and neo-nazi messaging will have that information.

Weird ancient guys

The meek may inherit the earth, but Silicon Valley Christians look like inheriting the money

Everything clicked when Peter Thiel gave the speech about God.

The occasion was a 40th birthday party for Trae Stephens, who is Mr. Thiel’s venture capital partner as well as one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a maker of high-tech defense systems and weaponry. It was a multiday affair, held in 2023 at Mr. Stephens’s home in New Mexico. It began with an evening roasting the birthday boy, followed by another toasting him and then a brunch with caviar bumps, mimosas and breakfast pizza. At the brunch (the theme was the Holy Ghost), Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing kingmaker, delivered a talk about miracles, forgiveness and Jesus Christ. The guests were enthralled.

“The room of over 220 people, mostly in technology and venture capital, were coming up to us saying, ‘Oh, my goodness, I didn’t know Peter Thiel was a Christian,’” recalled Michelle Stephens, Mr. Stephens’s wife. “‘He’s gay and a billionaire. How can he be Christian?’”

That reaction — eyebrows raised, curiosity genuine — gave Ms. Stephens an idea: Gather influential people, including in Silicon Valley, to talk about Christian belief. Last year, she started a nonprofit called ACTS 17 Collective, which holds events where the bigwigs of the tech and entertainment industries discuss their faith. For those seeking not just spiritually but also professionally, it’s a chance to get close to industry demigods.

Mr. Thiel was the featured speaker at the first ACTS 17 event last May, at the San Francisco home of Garry Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator. He talked about how Christian theology informs his politics and which of the Ten Commandments he finds most meaningful. (The first and last: Worship God, and don’t covet what others have.) A D.J. added ambience, mixing worship beats for the more than 200 attendees.

“We were always taught as Christians to serve the meek, the lowly, the marginalized,” Ms. Stephens said. “I think we’ve realized that, if anything, the rich, the wealthy, the powerful need Jesus just as much.”

In October, the nonprofit hosted another talk at Mr. Tan’s home, this time with Dr. Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, who has long talked about how he reconciles science with his Christian faith. Ms. Stephens is planning more events in San Francisco, as well as one in Los Angeles, and has reached out to potential speakers like Pat Gelsinger, the former chief executive of Intel, as well as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an activist and Muslim turned critic of Islam who converted to Christianity.

The name ACTS 17 is an acronym (Acknowledging Christ in Technology and Society), but it also refers to the biblical chapter in which Paul the Apostle crisscrosses Athens and Thessaloniki to spread the Gospel among Greek “kings and queens of culture,” as Ms. Stephens puts it, the eminent and affluent demographic that she aims to minister to today. It’s a somewhat counterintuitive Christian calling, she acknowledged.

Vance’s Munich Disgrace

By Brett Stevens of the NYT

The vice president’s speech last week at the Munich Security Conference — in which the man who refuses to say that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election lectured his audience about Europe’s retreat from democratic values — combined with his meeting with the leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, party, has caused a scandal because it is a scandal, a monument of arrogance based on a foundation of hypocrisy.

Why does the AfD dismay so many Germans, including traditional conservative voters? The party began in 2013 in protest of Germany’s fiscal policies in Europe. It gained a further boost through its opposition to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-arms policy toward the uncontrolled immigration of more than a million Middle Eastern refugees.

But the party soon took a much darker turn. In 2017, Björn Höcke, a party leader in the eastern state of Thuringia, complained that Germans were “the only people in the world who’ve planted a monument of shame at the heart of their capital” — a reference to the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust — and that the country needed “nothing less than a 180-degree turnaround in the politics of remembrance.” In 2018, the party leader at the time, Alexander Gauland, dismissed “Hitler and the Nazis” as “just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history.”

Last year, the German investigative news site Correctiv reported that in 2023 AfD politicians had met with other far-right extremists in a hotel in Potsdam, near Berlin, to discuss an “overall concept, in the sense of a master plan” for the “remigration” of “migrants” to their countries of ethnic origin — no matter whether those migrants were asylum seekers, permanent residents or German citizens. The star of the show was a 34-year-old Austrian named Martin Sellner, who as a teenager confessed to putting swastika stickers on a synagogue before going on to lead Austria’s so-called identitarian movement.

This record explains, in part, why all of Germany’s mainstream parties refuse to go into any sort of coalition government with the AfD, even as it is polling in second place in this month’s federal elections. … There’s another reason to fear the AfD. Last year, The Times’s Erika Solomon reported on a secret session in the German Parliament in which lawmakers heard evidence of ties between AfD politicians and Kremlin-connected operatives. The AfD denies the allegations, but it’s no surprise that the AfD wants to end German military aid for Ukraine and restart the Nord Stream pipelines through which Russia used to supply Germany with natural gas.

In its first term, the Trump administration fought tooth-and-nail against Nord Stream, on the justified grounds that it made Germany dependent on an enemy of the West. Someone might ask Ric Grenell, Trump’s former ambassador to Berlin and now his special envoy, why the administration is now so fond of a party that effectively sides with that enemy?

There’s an argument to be made in a future column that some European governments go too far to curtail legitimate free speech. There’s another one to be written about the many ways that Europe’s supposedly mainstream right-of-center parties, particularly Germany’s Christian Democrats under Merkel, adopted left-leaning positions on migration, domestic security, fiscal policy, energy policy and other issues that drove conservative voters into the arms of the far right.

For now, the important point is this: Much like a certain British prime minister long ago, an American vice president went to Munich to carry on about his idealism while breaking bread with those who would obliterate democratic ideals. A disgrace.

Having your good intentions engulfed by careerist cynicism on all sides harms your mental health: who knew?

I was preparing for the presentation at the top of this newsletter and checked out this documentary from Jennifer Nadel who was one of the organisers of my talk.

Politics as Living Hell

From what they call a ‘long-form’ piece in Esquire way back in 2014. Like a lot of long-form journalism, it was way too long-form for me, but you can read it in all its glory by clicking through should you wish. The bottom line is that being dysfunctional is only ever fun for the unhinged. As Adam Smith observed — indeed made the centre of his entire world view about humangoes in fact — what we most crave is others’ deserved respect.

I spoke with ninety members of the House and Senate about what's gone so wrong in Congress. Sometimes it got a little emotional.

"I didn't get elected to Congress to not get things done—most people here want to get things done. I didn't get elected to Congress to make meaningless speeches on C-SPAN and tell lies about people. I didn't get elected to Congress to scare the hell out of the country and drive the sides further apart. I didn't get elected to Congress because I love politics—I hate politics, to be perfectly honest, and if I didn't before I got here, I do now… ."

The man is very angry, about the way his life is going, about Washington, about some things he has found himself saying that he wishes he could take back—he got carried away, total herd mentality, just so juvenile. People in public life should take stuff back more often, apologize more, and correct course more—now that would be making a real statement, maybe even be a breath of fresh air for the public. But he would just be screwing himself, he goes on, because those guys at Heritage Action or Club for Growth or Americans for Prosperity or some other goddamn group with an Orwellian name that thrives off of division and exists to create conflict might primary him, drop $3 million on his head, and he would be dead. And the way his district is drawn, you can't ever be conservative enough. He could get up at one of his town halls and say that the president is a transvestite Muslim from Mars and get a standing ovation. He wants to do the right thing and make a public stand for greater decency and civility in public life. But he can't. Oh, in his own quiet way he does. He has many friends who happen to be Democrats. "No matter what it seems, we don't hate each other," he says. "We are civil, we try to get to know each other, and most of us work hard to find areas of agreement, things that we can make progress on. People are stunned when I tell them that, because from the outside it just looks so bad."

At the same time, it's worse than he thought it would be before he was elected, the congressman says. He's a Reagan Republican. Nobody drew more lines in the sand than Reagan, nobody was more of a partisan warrior, but Reagan didn't believe insane things about the opposition, and there wasn't this unconscionable amount of money in the system back then. "Bribery wasn't legal yet," he says.

Meanwhile at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship

I doubt I’d have liked being at the much vaunted ARC meeting in London this week. Yet more speeches by Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray. But then there’s this speech by David Brooks. I can’t think of a figure on the left who might give a speech like this. Can you?

Does Peer Review Penalize Scientific Risk Taking? Evidence from NIH Grant Renewals

[Quick answer: Yes.]

[But we can’t do anything about it because … well because.]

Scientific projects that carry a high degree of risk may be more likely to lead to breakthroughs yet also face challenges in winning the support necessary to be carried out. We analyze the determinants of renewal for more than 100,000 R01 grants from the National Institutes of Health between 1980 and 2015. We use four distinct proxies to measure risk taking: extreme tail outcomes, disruptiveness, pivoting from an investigator’s prior work, and standing out from the crowd in one’s field. After carefully controlling for investigator, grant, and institution characteristics, we measure the association between risk taking and grant renewal. Across each of these measures, we find that risky grants are renewed at markedly lower rates than less risky ones. We also provide evidence that the magnitude of the risk penalty is magnified for more novel areas of research and novice investigators, consistent with the academic community’s perception that current scientific institutions! do not motivate exploratory research adequately.

Michael Longley, RIP

I came upon these 13 minutes on my podcasting app and was glad I did. I didn’t even know of Irish poet Michael Longley. But he seems to take life seriously. Or rather did take his life seriously. He died this year. This was the passage of the program I loved the most. At the risk of sounding precious, I try to keep the forgery to a minimum in my own writing. Some of it isn’t much chop, but I try not to make it pretend thinking. In my game there’s a lot of forgery. I mentioned it a few weeks ago. Inside a bureaucracy forgeries are the only legal tender. A genuine attempt to present some real thinking comes back marked “insufficient funds”.

You've spent a life writing poetry, Michael. Would you have had it any other way?

Absolutely no other way. I can't imagine that I would be alive now if I hadn't had poetry propelling me forward, looking always for the next poem and living out with courage and honesty, the silent periods.

I mean, in my 40s, I didn't write a poem for nearly a decade, so it was important to be true to the silence and not to create forgeries. Because when you're proficient stylistically, it's terribly easy to produce forgeries. And what the inner adventure of poetry has taught me about is courage and patience and honesty.

Some poems read (I think) by the author. From this website.

Declining Life Satisfaction and Happiness Among Young Adults in Six English-speaking Countries
Jean Twenge and David G. Blanchflower #33490

We report eleven studies that show declines in life satisfaction and happiness among young adults in the last decade or so, with less uniform trends among older adults. We found consistent evidence for this for the U.S. in the recent sweeps of several micro data sets including the Behavioral Risk Factor Survey, the General Social Survey, and the American National Election Survey. In the U. S. life satisfaction rises with age. This is broadly confirmed in several other datasets including four from the European Commission across five other English-speaking countries: Australia, Canada, Ireland New Zealand and the UK. Declining wellbeing of the young was also found in the World Values Survey, the Global Flourishing Study and Global Minds. There is broad evidence across all of these English-speaking countries that happiness and life satisfaction since 2020 rise with age. In several of these surveys we also find that ill-being declines in age. The U-shape in wellbeing by age tha! t used to exist in these countries is now gone, replaced by a crisis in wellbeing among the young.

A riveting listen

Kevin Kelly’s tips for travellers

Kevin Kelly is a pioneer of the prelapsarian days of the internet — you know when it seemed like we’d built a machine for human freedom, and before we found it was a machine for taking our society on a trip to the bottom of the brainstem. He wrote What Technology Wants which is a very good book, or I found it so when I read it about fifteen years ago.

Anyway, here’s a list of his tips for travelling. He’s talking about travelling as E&E (engagement and experience) not as R&R. Anyway, you can click through to the list but one of my faves was:

• Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest! The easiest way to do this is to find the local wedding hall where weddings happen on schedule and approach a wedding party with a request to attend. They will usually feel honored. You can offer the newlyweds a small token gift of cash if you want. You will be obliged to dance. Take photos of them; they will take photos of you. It will make your day and theirs. (I’ve crashed a wedding in most of the countries I have visited.)

• The most significant criteria to use when selecting travel companions is: do they complain or not, even when complaints are justified? No complaining! Complaints are for the debriefing afterwards when travel is over.

• If you are fortunate, a fantastic way to share your fortune is to gift a friend the cost of travel with you. You both will have a great time.

• FlightAware is the best free phone app for the status of your flight. It will often tell you about delays hours before the airline will. Tip: use FlightAware to check whether your plane has even arrived at your departure airport.

• In 53 years of travelling with all kinds of people, I’ve seen absolutely no correlation between where you eat and whether you have intestinal problems, so to maximize the enjoyment of local foods, my rule of thumb is to eat wherever healthy-looking locals eat.

• The list of most coveted cities to visit have one striking thing in common—they are pedestrian centric. They reward walking. Better online hotel sites like Booking.com have map interfaces which allow you to select hotels by their location. Whenever possible I book my hotel near to where it is best to walk, so I can stroll out the door and begin to wander.

• The Google Translate app for your phone is seriously good, and free. It will translate voice, text, or script to and from 250 languages. Use for deciphering menus, signs, talking with clerks, etc. It is often a lifesaver.

• The rate you go is not determined by how fast you walk, bike or drive, but by how long your breaks are. Slow down. Take lots of breaks. The most memorable moments—conversations with amazing strangers, an invite inside, a hidden artwork—will usually happen when you are not moving.

• If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival.

• Put inexpensive Apple AirTags into your bags, so you can track them when they are out of your sight. More and more airlines are integrating AirTags into their system to help find wayward bags. The tags work for luggage left in hotel storage, or stashed beneath the bus, or pieces you need to forward.

Trump is weaponizing financial payments: here's what you can do.

Checks out with my priors

Funny

I’m shocked, shocked that business patronises the businesses of powerful people. I wonder how that could be relevant to the US today?

Market-based Lobbying: Evidence from Advertising Spending in Italy

Stefano DellaVigna, Ruben Durante, Brian Knight & Eliana La Ferrara

December 2013

An extensive literature has studied lobbying by special interest groups. We analyze a novel lobbying channel: lobbying businessmen-politicians through business proxies. When a politician controls a business, firms attempting to curry favors shift their spending towards the politician's business. The politician benefits from increased revenues, and the firms hope for favorable regulation in return. We investigate this channel in Italy where government members, including the prime minister, are not required to divest business holdings. We examine the evolution of advertising spending by firms over the period 1994 to 2009, during which Silvio Berlusconi was prime minister on and off three times, while maintaining control of Italy's major private television network, Mediaset. We predict that firms attempting to curry favor with the government shift their advertising budget towards Berlusconi's channels when Berlusconi is in power. Indeed, we document a significant pro-Mediaset bias in the allocation of advertising spending during Berlusconi's political tenure. This pattern is especially pronounced for companies operating in more regulated sectors, as predicted. Using a model of supply and demand in the advertising market, we estimate one billion euros of extra revenue to Berlusconi's group. We also estimate the expected returns in regulation to politically motivated spenders of similar magnitude, stressing the economic importance of this lobbying channel. These findings provide an additional rationale for rules on conflict of interest.

The lovely painting of John Wolseley

Heaviosity half-hour

I’m really enjoying this book. Congrats to the author for shoehorning an academic book into a trade book. Even so, there’s a fair bit of throat-clearing. Surely it wouldn’t harm an academic book if that was relegated to footnotes? It’s a pity the book is so expensive. I used ChatGPT to reformat it from the broken carriage returns and other things from being scraped from a pdf file. It kept gaslighting me, telling me it had done the whole job when it hadn’t. So I hope it makes sense. If not, blame the century you chose to live in.

The Banality of Wokeness

Many on the right talk about wokeness in apocalyptic terms, as some kind of extraordinary danger to "the West," democracy, liberalism, truth, and freedom—as corrosive to U.S. society and culture. At the other end of the political spectrum, there are many on the left who hold that elites have been able to "capture" woke ideology because the associated beliefs are uniquely prone to capture and especially useful for dividing "the people" against one another (making them easier to rule). These critics typically suggest class-based organizing as an alternative, as though this approach were somehow immune or more resistant to elite capture. In fact, there have been myriad oppressive, exploitative, and hierarchical regimes that were ushered into power on the back of class conflict, ostensibly to support the working man at the expense of greedy capitalists (Mao Zedong’s China, Joseph Stalin’s Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the current regime in North Korea, and on and on).

For that matter, consider Occupy Wall Street. As Richard Reeves argued:

"The rhetoric of ‘We are the 99 percent’ has in fact been dangerously self-serving, allowing people with healthy six-figure incomes to convince themselves that they are somehow in the same economic boat as ordinary Americans, and that it is just the so-called super rich who are to blame for inequality."
Reeves’s research amply shows that declines in social mobility and rising inequality cannot be well explained or addressed by simply focusing on the "1 percent." Yet that is precisely what many symbolic capitalists attempted to do via Occupy: deflect blame onto others using class-based rhetoric, just as they often do with identitarian frameworks. And it was ultimately these same elites who killed the Occupy movement through their insistence on symbolic politics. As Catherine Liu aptly described it:

"The highly educated members of Occupy fetishized the procedural regulation and management of discussion to reach consensus about all collective decisions. Daily meetings or General Assemblies were managed according to a technique called the progressive stack. Its fanatical commitment to proceduralism and administrative strategy suppressed real discussion of priorities or politics and ended up promoting only the integrity of the progressive stack itself. Protecting the stack became more important than formulating political demands that might have resonated with hundreds of millions of Americans whose lives were being directly destroyed by finance capital. PMC [professional-managerial class]/New Left ideas about mass movements dominated Occupy’s dreams of politics and limited the effectiveness of its activism. Demographically and politically, Occupy was squarely a PMC elite formation."

In the wake of Occupy’s collapse, one of the movement’s self-described “cofounders,” Micah White, attempted to cash in on the Occupy "brand" by creating a firm—Boutique Activist Consultancy—that offered, among other things, talks and workshops on activism for $10,000–$75,000. Although the consultancy venture ultimately flopped, White continues to try to advertise “Activist School” classes on his website, emphasizing that he partnered with elite universities like Bard and Princeton to produce the content (which, among other issues, continues to include lectures on activism by Rachel Dolezal!). As the capstone to his post-Occupy journey, White penned a self-promotional editorial in The Guardiangushing about being invited to the 2020 World Economic Forum in Davos and speculating about the revolutionary potential of hobnobbing with the millionaires and billionaires therein.

In short, class-based activist movements seem to be quite amenable to elite capture as well. Indeed, as philosopher Asad Haider explained, this is a tension that has basically defined Socialist movements from Karl Marx’s time through the present... and has often been their undoing.

The bottom line is that literally any ideology can be “captured” by elites. There was nothing in the Gospels that dictated the particular form of the Holy Roman Empire, nor that rendered Christianity especially useful (relative to other religions) for establishing such an empire. If anything, the message of Jesus stands in direct opposition to such a regime. Similarly, the Qur’an nowhere dictated the structure of the contemporary petrostate monarchy of Saudi Arabia any more than Das Kapital determined the character of the Chinese government—either in Mao’s time or today. Instead, as Friedrich Nietzsche argued:

"There is no set of maxims more important for a historian than this: the actual causes of a thing’s origin and its eventual uses, the manner of its incorporation into a system of purposes, are worlds apart; that everything that exists, no matter what its origin, is periodically reinterpreted by those in power in terms of fresh intentions... in the course of which the earlier meaning and purpose are necessarily either obscured or lost."

Elites in other social orders justified their status, their behaviors, and the prosecution of their enemies in the name of Christianity, Islam, or communism. Contemporary symbolic capitalists often do so in the name of antiracism, feminism, LGBTQ rights, and so on. But it is not as though we’d be disinclined or somehow unable to legitimize our behaviors or justify power grabs in the absence of “woke” ideology. We would, of course, simply rely on some other framework instead.

However, any ideology used by elites to justify the prevailing order can also be used by opponents to undermine that order. There were Christian arguments against the injustice of the medieval Christian regimes—ultimately leading to the Protestant Reformation and many other dramatic social changes. Many contemporary Muslims rail against the contemporary regime in Saudi Arabia on explicitly Islamic grounds. Contemporary youth in China use Marxism to criticize their ostensibly Communist government for failing the working class. Ideas associated with wokeness can similarly provide us with tools for challenging the order that has been established in its name. In many respects, that is precisely the project of this book.

In short, critics on the left and right, alongside die-hard believers, are united in an erroneous perception that there is something special about “woke” ideology, that the ideas associated with wokeness are somehow especially dangerous or powerful. In truth, there is nothing extraordinary about these ideologies. We can and should talk about wokeness, and explore the relationship between “woke” ideology and the social order, just as we would for any other constellation of beliefs, norms, and dispositions.

Ideals and Interests

Consuming prominent analyses of the post-2010 era, one might gain the impression that wokeness became institutionally dominant because huge numbers of elites and elite aspirants read a bunch of Marx, Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, were completely convinced by their respective arguments, and are now trying to reshape institutions and society writ large in accordance with the prescriptions of these thinkers, as derived from their texts. In reality, many of the practices associated with wokeness betray, if anything, a lack of deep knowledge or engagement with the literatures that are purported to have spawned the dispositions, discourses, and practices in question.

For instance, sociologist Patricia Hill Collins invented the “matrix of oppression” framework illustrating that race, class, gender, and sexual oppression are intimately interrelated and mutually reinforcing. One could point to her work as a source of the idea that some groups are uniformly and objectively more oppressed than others on the basis of intersectional advantages and disadvantages, allowing one to add up the different identity categories one belongs to and determine how oppressed one is relative to others—a mode of thought perhaps best captured by the (possibly satirical) “intersectionality score calculator.” One could argue that Collins’s integration of her Matrix of Oppression framework with standpoint epistemology contributed to the widespread notion that people who are most oppressed can understand society most clearly, and therefore those who identify with a greater number of, and more severely oppressed, identity categories should be given more deference and respect as compared with those who can lay claim to fewer and less marginalized identities. The problem with making these attributions, however, is that Collins rejected each of these ideas directly and unequivocally in Black Feminist Thought (the text that introduced the Matrix of Oppression framework):

"Rather than emphasizing how a Black woman’s standpoint and its accompanying epistemology differ from those of White women, Black men and other collectivities, Black women’s experiences serve as one specific social location for examining points of connection among multiple epistemologies. Viewing Black feminist epistemology in this way challenges additive analyses of oppression claiming that... oppression can be quantified and compared... The more subordinated the group, the purer the vision available to them... Although it’s tempting to claim that Black women are more oppressed than everyone else and therefore have the best standpoint from which to understand the mechanisms, processes and effects of oppression, this is not the case. Instead... each group speaks from its own standpoint and shares its own partial, situated knowledge."

Wokeness is clearly not a result of people being indoctrinated into social justice activism through a deep reading of primary texts like these. For a better understanding of what’s going on, we can turn to the ethnographic research of sociologist Shamus Khan. In Privilege, Khan illustrated that a core competency elites develop over the course of their upbringing is how to confidently name-drop works, thinkers, and ideas they know little about—and in ways that create a veneer of sophistication and erudition. References perceived to enhance prestige among peers and institutional gatekeepers are especially likely to be cultivated. Critically, these superficially deep yet substantively shallow modes of speaking about hot topics, big ideas, and influential thinkers are a product of enculturation, not studying in any traditional sense, not even when these discourses are adopted in college (as they often are).

Far from being intellectually converted by intensive engagement with academic arguments, symbolic capitalists embrace wokeness largely because it serves their interests to do so. They often encounter these social justice ideas in distorted and simplified form via secondary or tertiary sources. They may genuinely believe in these ideas, as they understand them. However, they generally interpret and mobilize these social justice discourses in ways that serve their interests. It’s worth unpacking these claims a bit because they’re central to the argument of this book. They’re also easy to misunderstand.

To get a handle on the relation between symbolic capitalists’ interests and wokeness, we can leverage some theoretical tools from Max Weber. Weber argued that behaviors, discourse, and cognition tend to be goal oriented: we do the things we do, say the things we say, and think the things we think because we want things. And before wanting anything else, we seek to satisfy our material needs. Pretty much everyone desires wealth (sufficient to ensure food, clothing, shelter, etc.), security (broadly construed to include not just physical safety but also the minimization of uncertainty, precarity, and risk), health, sexual satisfaction, and an ability to reproduce. However, the very universality of these materialist desires limits their explanatory value for social theory. Insofar as core material interests are universal and more or less constant, they can’t do much to explain social differences or social change. You can only explain variation by appealing to things that vary. Happily for social theorists, Weber argued, not all of our aspirations are oriented toward material ends, and not everything we do can be reduced to materialist motives. People also have ideal interests that transcend and can supervene our most primal wants and needs.

In contrast with material interests, ideal interests are mental, social, or spiritual in nature. Desires for status, prestige, deference, or honor are examples of ideal interests. So is the hunger for meaning, purpose, or fulfillment. Or yearning to understand others or to be understood, or to love and be loved in turn. The drives for technical mastery and intellectual or spiritual enlightenment represent ideal interests. Enhancing the social position of the groups or institutions one identifies with is an ideal interest. So is the desire to be “on the right side of history,” or the aspiration to build a legacy that survives one’s physical death, or the quest to attain spiritual salvation. Weber argued that although ideal interests have a generic component (which is why we can talk about them abstractly), they are much more culturally and historically informed than material interests. Their specific content varies more radically depending on the historical and sociocultural milieu in which one operates and the roles one occupies therein.

Weber emphasized that although they’re less critical to survival per se, ideal interests are extremely important to people—especially social elites (who worry less about satisfying their basic material needs). In fact, when material and ideal interests come into conflict, it’s regularly the ideal interests that end up dominating—for instance, people often put their own health and safety at risk for a principle or a cause. In other cases, there can be a strong synergy between ideal and material interests. Among symbolic capitalists, for instance, ideal interests like status, prestige, and deference are intimately bound up with our ability to satisfy basic material needs. The pursuit of ideal interests on behalf of ourselves and others is how we put food on the table.

Collectively, Weber asserted, our ideal and material interests often shape which ideologies we are drawn to, and how we interpret and leverage them. Here, too, some clarification can be useful.

Insofar as one’s interests are shown to inform one’s beliefs, this is often interpreted as a sign that someone is being cynical or insincere. In truth, this is a pretty bad way to think about thinking. Our brains are designed to perceive and interpret the world in ways that enhance our success or further our goals. We readily believe and focus on that which is useful or pleasurable to embrace. We tend to avoid, resist, or abandon information or ideas that are inconvenient or detrimental. There is no contradiction, then, in assuming that a belief or identity claim is sincere while also recognizing that material or ideal interests seem to inform the adoption of this identity or belief. Nor is there any contradiction in observing that sincerely held beliefs tend to be deployed instrumentally. Indeed, the more useful a belief or identity is, the more sincerely it is likely to be held. Having an interest in striking a particular position does not undermine one’s sincerity—it typically enhances it.

It is also critical to emphasize that the relationship between interests and ideas is not unidirectional. At certain points, and under the right circumstances, ideological innovations can dramatically change how people understand and pursue their interests. Ideas and world-images even have the capacity to transform the character and operation of society writ large. Weber’s most famous illustration of this latter point was in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Weber began that work by emphasizing that, although capitalism had existed in most societies for most of human history, its growth was often constrained by cultural and religious norms that rendered the accumulation of wealth or the aggressive pursuit of commercial interests unethical for most people. Calvinist theology, however, urged believers to work as if their labors were being performed for God himself, and to be prudent in expending the fruits of their labor. Calvinist-derived interpretations of predestination, meanwhile, led many to believe that people God favored would generally enjoy prosperity in this life as well as the next (as a function of their hard work, discipline, and other positive virtues). These theological beliefs gave Calvinists powerful new ideal interests in pursuing industry and wealth—above and beyond the materialist concerns for comfort and security that all people share.

Critically, while Calvinist theology weakened many Christian taboos against wealth accumulation, it imposed and maintained others. For instance, Calvinist theology insisted that wealth should be acquired by hard work, thrift, and discipline (rather than deception, theft, gambling, etc.). Even those who had accumulated great fortune were expected to continue being industrious for as long as they were able to work. Calvinists were not permitted to use any fortune they amassed to secure additional mates, to eat gluttonously, to drink recklessly, or to acquire ostentatious clothes or homes. That is, they were largely forbidden from using their wealth to satisfy material interests once their basic needs had been met. As a consequence of these taboos, many Calvinists’ wealth grew dramatically over time and accumulated across generations. Others then began emulating Calvinists in order to compete with them (and in the hope of enjoying similar prosperity).

In turn, Weber argued, growing numbers of people behaving like Calvinists supercharged and transformed capitalism. Processes and institutions became increasingly rationalized and disciplined. Productivity expectations began to rise. Eventually, it became difficult for those who did not behave like Calvinists to sustain themselves. Even people who had no desire to live like Calvinists were compelled nonetheless to embody Calvinist ideals upon pain of destitution. Europe, the United States, and eventually the entire globe were radically transformed by this “elective affinity” between capitalism and Calvinism—despite the fact that Calvinists were a religious minority. At the time Weber was writing, Calvinism was an even weaker force in Western society than it had been when these transformations began, yet everyone continued to be trapped in the “iron cage” of bureaucratic rational capitalism inspired by Calvinist ideology. Today, Calvinism is even more marginal, but rational-legal capitalism has only grown more hegemonic. The social transformations Weber cataloged may have been initiated by an ideology, but they were not ultimately bound by it.

Under the right conditions, then, ideas can not only supervene upon material interests, they can reshape institutions and social dynamics in such a way that their influence continues to be felt even when they are no longer widely believed, discussed, or even recognized in their original form. Specters of these ideas may persist, disconnected from their genesis, while adherents have little sense of their origin (in much the same way that Americans continue to embrace many Calvinist ideas about work with little knowledge of their theological foundations and typically having never read anything by John Calvin). Ultimately, the practical ways that ideas function “in the world” are often very different than what their creators may have anticipated or desired. (John Calvin, for instance, did not set out to establish rational-legal capitalism worldwide. Were he alive today, he may even be deeply troubled by the social order that is, in important respects, a product of his work.)

With all this in mind, we can restate a core argument of this book: a set of idiosyncratic ideas about social justice have come to inform how mainstream symbolic capitalists understand and pursue their interests—creating highly novel forms of competition and legitimation. When symbolic capitalists deploy social justice discourse in self-interested ways, sometimes they’re pursuing material interests like securing high-paying jobs or eliminating rivals. Other times, however, they’re seeking ideal interests, like convincing themselves and others that they’re good people who deserve what they have (while their opponents are bad people who deserve to have bad things happen to them). In many cases, they’re pursuing material and ideal interests simultaneously. Across the board, symbolic capitalists often pursue their interests by embracing beliefs that seem superficially antithetical to those interests. For instance, white symbolic capitalists regularly align themselves with antiracism, male symbolic capitalists support feminism, and so forth.

To understand how symbolic capitalists’ bids for status and power became so entangled with woke signaling, we’ll have to brush up on some history.

1. Aron, Raymond. 1961. “The Liberal Definition of Liberty. On F. A. Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty ,” reprinted in Aron 2006. Translation from the French by Google.