You made it to the comment section? You should check out Cities in Ashes, where you can read about how Sir Glubb (yes really, Sir Glubb) joins Carroll Quigley and Ozzy Spengler in describing this present period of anxiety and instability in terms of an the ever-turning Cycle of Empires: https://citiesinashes.substack.com/p/fate-of-empires-the-ascent
"Organizing" may be too strong a word, but you don't need much organization to tear things down and blow things up.
Incidentally do you notice how this post has "1 Like" even though you and Meika both liked it? I don't think Meika's likes are counted by substack's code. It's the same here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/can-you-divide-by-zero
So Jean Twenge might give Peter Turchin right through letting us predict that generation Z is so easily offended that they will cause that social unrest that Turchin predicts with his statistical methods?
By now I think it is clear that Substack has something against you:
1. It closed your blog down
2. It called your blog spam
3. It intentionally provokes you through failing to count to three below a post on mathematics
Ah, you noticed that little bit of irony too, it seems!
My sense is that Turchin is goingh to be right for weird reasons. What Peter Turchin describes seems to be at a higher level, or more abstract, than what Jean Twenge discusses. Twenge's model is that technology has changed individualism and made us into Narcissistic infants. (Twenge is totally not correct, here, but whatever, I have to pick my battles sometimes) Do Turchin cycles predict rising technology before unrest?
>>Do Turchin cycles predict rising technology before unrest?
Turchin doesn't write much about it in his books about current society. But in his books on history he points out that low wages and concentration of wealth in the hands of elites made more technically advanced project, like cathedrals, possible before things got violent for real.
Last year I was writing on this exact subject, before I started the blog I was writing as much if not more, but none of that work has made in onto the blog it just hangs there in my mind, one day I thought to myself, one day I'll get to it...
so instead I write everything from scratch, even if I have typed up notes someplace... so I will continue that method ... so here is what I have written today, after reading the above post about 4 hours ago. It would be a post on my blog, where I would add more links and stuff.
it will be a very raw..... first draft... ---
____Narcissists and another thing_________
Apple pie gives some reasons why _socius_ based studies go off the rails, with a periodic deep dive into the climate of an atmosphere. He went easy on the butterfly chaos metaphors though.
Broadly, _socius_ studies began looking at society as if it were an object in itself. And it may have parts but for simplicity’s sake" we’ll ignore" the molecular and sub-atomic levels (and if we do it will be only economic motivations/ considerations and only talk of them in reference to market/government contested "structures" (dialectical structures). So this society is already a big object, with no past, no pre-history, no evolutionary survival contexts...
My own exposure to a break-down of the _socius_ hegemony was via Mary Douglas, a somewhat conservative by temperament Catholic anthropologist, whose Durkheimianish work I discovered in-my late 20s. It looked at the biases we each have and how they inform our choices in relation to concepts like “nature” or “morality”, in terms of what we make in fashion, or in arbitrarily linking fashion to an inclination (in regard to how ‘nature’ or ‘morality’ is perceived : fragile, robust, robust within limits, or chaotic/unknowable).
I took that idea and ran with it in terms of complexity chaos butterfly theories, iterations as choices repeated, and strange attractors. Societies might be better seen as emergent phenomena with histories. Not an object, but a thing. A thing of things. A meeting of meetings.
_Socius_ based works have often totally ignore the individual’s own story, and their agency, and does so much like a narcissistic emperor does, because to a monarch all the parts need to be controlled at all times, because all parts are a threat just by exist. But then according to Steinmetz sociology and anthropology are an arm of an imperial (French) government first (much like the Catholic Church) and not science, how ever scientific it might appear/tries to.
In _socius_ based work a particular structure is given a determining explanatory power, either as an ideology or as a a false ideology… I am mixing my metaphors here intensely.
Usually fairly straight structuralism would say something like the "infrastructure" (e.g. capital as uncovered by Marx, or some motherfuckery by Freud if talking about a single human’s unconscious as an object) and ideology as the lies we tell ourselves that everything is alright and good under heaven.
The “real” structure is unconscious to the members of society because of a false consciousness AKA ideology. The word ideology is then scattered like mud over our souls because depended on your preference one man’s meat is another man’s poison. For some the uncovered secret knowledge is true knowledge and for others it is just more ideology. (All this removes/hides agency from both the discoverers and the the protectors (the producers and social work of those producers making and meeting each other) who must then ---in the name of the good --- fight each others' lies of __the lie__ like ancient Zoroastrian emperors, the original emperors, the originary narcissists of power) for the glory of god/truth/light etc.
Recently, in the more polarising stupidity of the politics of the last 150 years or so, we argue about whose agencies are true consciousness and whose are false. With narcissists the overall winners of this binary win-lose race. And they don't even care.
Catch-phrases and slogans for and used in this stupidity include “control the narrative”, “preferred pronoun” and “there is no alternative”.
In recent decades there has been an attempt on one side to broaden studies of the _Socius_ by looking at the experience of disaffected/exploited/oppressed groups (often boxed as cross-stitched identities created by the controllers of the narrative in false/true consciousneseseseseses) in intersectionality of lived experience, but it still does not look at actual individual biases and choices, i.e. it broadens the number of structures from one structure uncovered by a powerful new narrative, to many, but doesn’t use them any differently from when there was only the one. It just gets more complicated and thus fudge-able into making a better world., but if all it does is multiply the number of castes or classes then it does not get rid of either castes or classes, or any other cross-stitched box. Or pronoun.
Structuralism, emperors and narcissism have a lot in common. If not the same urge.
And that is then the lot of the common people.
At the other extreme we have studies of the_persona_ i.e. psychology which describe the molecular and even sub-atomic graduations, but rarely step out of therapeutic individualism foci for reasons of professionalism with regard to what helps the patient. Patient-centred therapy is not helpful to the rest of us in the _socius_ if a pscyhopathic sociopath is on the loose with an army of automatic weapons and a sense of destiny induced by conspiracy feelings.
For some reason the experts, our experts, on narcissism cannot step up and out of the individual help into how we should police narcissists, they restrict their professional platforms to the considerations of the patient, which may mean survivors, but the rest of us just go… yeah, the best we can do is run away, we are told, just run away, but that is the best we can do?
Surely it would be better to inform all our practices and levels of agency with a notice at the very least of red flags, while we move on to at least begin discussing what to do more generally about narcissists (for example)?
My own idea of social ecology is one that takes the sub-atomic (neuro-diversity), the molecular pathologies of individuals in their worlds, as well as the emergent “structures” that arise from those interactions and things, not in order to explain, nor change the world, but to live in the world as a safe nurturing healthy place.
I.E. to know the dance we live, and to know we live the dance, and to dance that knowledge as we live, requiring acknowledgement of agency, mis-agency and responsibilities that then descend, rather than rights we have lost as orphans. Orphans have rights in a world that creates and allows orphans to exist, that is the stupidity of structuralisms in their narcissistic frames.
Generally orphans do not exist in the world, they exist in our worlds of effort that eschew agency, where we have failed to take up the challenge of being adults together, and fail to ask, “And this, or that, is it good worlding?”
I'm going to be a pain in the rear here and point out that you're assuming that wearing a mask would slow the spread of COVID. This is simply not the case. Even the CDC (pre-2020) had dozens of studies showing that face masks simply do not stop the spread of viral diseases.
Refusing to do something that doesn't work isn't whiny.
You're not being a pain! My experience of conservatives complaining about masks has never been to appeal to studies, though. Can you cite a study that does indeed show masks are ineffective at slowing the spread of COVID?
I can't find what I was recalling offhand (information overload, sorry) - but I did some searching and came up with this review article which said that the evidence was weak:
And yes, I know that it's about influenza, not Covid, but they spread in the same way.
If COVID spread predominantly through droplet transmission, rather than aerosols, then the case for masking would be much stronger. But it doesn't, so it isn't.
My standpoint is encapsulated by this sentence: "There is some evidence to support the wearing of masks or respirators during illness to protect others, and public health emphasis on mask wearing during illness may help to reduce influenza virus transmission."
I never wore a mask to keep *myself* safe; it was to encourage everyone to wear them, thus slowing transmission in order to reduce the rate of mutation and prevent hospitals from being overrun.
That word 'may' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. And while I don't oppose you wearing your mask, I do oppose others insisting I wear one, and I do object to people calling me 'whiny' for rejecting thinly sourced evidence.
It don't think it's whiny to reject the efficacy of masks. People who whine are whiny.
Remember, I live in small town USA, where American flags wave proudly in the wind, and instead of A/S/L people ask "What church do you go to?" There are people in my social group who do much more than whine - they've also yelled at, honked at, and generally harassed people for wearing a mask.
I object to "using evidence of thin evidence to protect oneself from accusations of whiny". It red flags narcissism, if not in truth then in support for caring less about what worlds better, and more about conspiracy feelings as excuses for being justified in being a narcissist.
How to world better? Ask does it world better? Does a mask world better? If yes, even if poorly, then wear a mask. Turning mask wearing into a culture war battlefield is bad worlding by bad politicians.
BTW I live in Australia so any rights you may speak of, in reply, I do not have as a subject of King Charles.
I feel like I know Eric pretty well by now; I doubt he's a Narcissist. He strikes me more as a beleaguered tech worker with religious interests surrounded by intolerant liberals.
Also I still am not sure what "to world" means, but this comment helps give a sense; my current working definition is "to act in such a way as to influence the world in a way you like."
You made it to the comment section? You should check out Cities in Ashes, where you can read about how Sir Glubb (yes really, Sir Glubb) joins Carroll Quigley and Ozzy Spengler in describing this present period of anxiety and instability in terms of an the ever-turning Cycle of Empires: https://citiesinashes.substack.com/p/fate-of-empires-the-ascent
So now I just need Jean Twenge to figure out whether offended people are capable of organizing a revolution or a civil war, Turchin-style?
"Organizing" may be too strong a word, but you don't need much organization to tear things down and blow things up.
Incidentally do you notice how this post has "1 Like" even though you and Meika both liked it? I don't think Meika's likes are counted by substack's code. It's the same here: https://thingstoread.substack.com/p/can-you-divide-by-zero
So Jean Twenge might give Peter Turchin right through letting us predict that generation Z is so easily offended that they will cause that social unrest that Turchin predicts with his statistical methods?
By now I think it is clear that Substack has something against you:
1. It closed your blog down
2. It called your blog spam
3. It intentionally provokes you through failing to count to three below a post on mathematics
Ah, you noticed that little bit of irony too, it seems!
My sense is that Turchin is goingh to be right for weird reasons. What Peter Turchin describes seems to be at a higher level, or more abstract, than what Jean Twenge discusses. Twenge's model is that technology has changed individualism and made us into Narcissistic infants. (Twenge is totally not correct, here, but whatever, I have to pick my battles sometimes) Do Turchin cycles predict rising technology before unrest?
>>Do Turchin cycles predict rising technology before unrest?
Turchin doesn't write much about it in his books about current society. But in his books on history he points out that low wages and concentration of wealth in the hands of elites made more technically advanced project, like cathedrals, possible before things got violent for real.
Last year I was writing on this exact subject, before I started the blog I was writing as much if not more, but none of that work has made in onto the blog it just hangs there in my mind, one day I thought to myself, one day I'll get to it...
so instead I write everything from scratch, even if I have typed up notes someplace... so I will continue that method ... so here is what I have written today, after reading the above post about 4 hours ago. It would be a post on my blog, where I would add more links and stuff.
it will be a very raw..... first draft... ---
____Narcissists and another thing_________
Apple pie gives some reasons why _socius_ based studies go off the rails, with a periodic deep dive into the climate of an atmosphere. He went easy on the butterfly chaos metaphors though.
Broadly, _socius_ studies began looking at society as if it were an object in itself. And it may have parts but for simplicity’s sake" we’ll ignore" the molecular and sub-atomic levels (and if we do it will be only economic motivations/ considerations and only talk of them in reference to market/government contested "structures" (dialectical structures). So this society is already a big object, with no past, no pre-history, no evolutionary survival contexts...
My own exposure to a break-down of the _socius_ hegemony was via Mary Douglas, a somewhat conservative by temperament Catholic anthropologist, whose Durkheimianish work I discovered in-my late 20s. It looked at the biases we each have and how they inform our choices in relation to concepts like “nature” or “morality”, in terms of what we make in fashion, or in arbitrarily linking fashion to an inclination (in regard to how ‘nature’ or ‘morality’ is perceived : fragile, robust, robust within limits, or chaotic/unknowable).
I took that idea and ran with it in terms of complexity chaos butterfly theories, iterations as choices repeated, and strange attractors. Societies might be better seen as emergent phenomena with histories. Not an object, but a thing. A thing of things. A meeting of meetings.
_Socius_ based works have often totally ignore the individual’s own story, and their agency, and does so much like a narcissistic emperor does, because to a monarch all the parts need to be controlled at all times, because all parts are a threat just by exist. But then according to Steinmetz sociology and anthropology are an arm of an imperial (French) government first (much like the Catholic Church) and not science, how ever scientific it might appear/tries to.
In _socius_ based work a particular structure is given a determining explanatory power, either as an ideology or as a a false ideology… I am mixing my metaphors here intensely.
Usually fairly straight structuralism would say something like the "infrastructure" (e.g. capital as uncovered by Marx, or some motherfuckery by Freud if talking about a single human’s unconscious as an object) and ideology as the lies we tell ourselves that everything is alright and good under heaven.
The “real” structure is unconscious to the members of society because of a false consciousness AKA ideology. The word ideology is then scattered like mud over our souls because depended on your preference one man’s meat is another man’s poison. For some the uncovered secret knowledge is true knowledge and for others it is just more ideology. (All this removes/hides agency from both the discoverers and the the protectors (the producers and social work of those producers making and meeting each other) who must then ---in the name of the good --- fight each others' lies of __the lie__ like ancient Zoroastrian emperors, the original emperors, the originary narcissists of power) for the glory of god/truth/light etc.
Recently, in the more polarising stupidity of the politics of the last 150 years or so, we argue about whose agencies are true consciousness and whose are false. With narcissists the overall winners of this binary win-lose race. And they don't even care.
Catch-phrases and slogans for and used in this stupidity include “control the narrative”, “preferred pronoun” and “there is no alternative”.
In recent decades there has been an attempt on one side to broaden studies of the _Socius_ by looking at the experience of disaffected/exploited/oppressed groups (often boxed as cross-stitched identities created by the controllers of the narrative in false/true consciousneseseseseses) in intersectionality of lived experience, but it still does not look at actual individual biases and choices, i.e. it broadens the number of structures from one structure uncovered by a powerful new narrative, to many, but doesn’t use them any differently from when there was only the one. It just gets more complicated and thus fudge-able into making a better world., but if all it does is multiply the number of castes or classes then it does not get rid of either castes or classes, or any other cross-stitched box. Or pronoun.
Structuralism, emperors and narcissism have a lot in common. If not the same urge.
And that is then the lot of the common people.
At the other extreme we have studies of the_persona_ i.e. psychology which describe the molecular and even sub-atomic graduations, but rarely step out of therapeutic individualism foci for reasons of professionalism with regard to what helps the patient. Patient-centred therapy is not helpful to the rest of us in the _socius_ if a pscyhopathic sociopath is on the loose with an army of automatic weapons and a sense of destiny induced by conspiracy feelings.
For some reason the experts, our experts, on narcissism cannot step up and out of the individual help into how we should police narcissists, they restrict their professional platforms to the considerations of the patient, which may mean survivors, but the rest of us just go… yeah, the best we can do is run away, we are told, just run away, but that is the best we can do?
Surely it would be better to inform all our practices and levels of agency with a notice at the very least of red flags, while we move on to at least begin discussing what to do more generally about narcissists (for example)?
My own idea of social ecology is one that takes the sub-atomic (neuro-diversity), the molecular pathologies of individuals in their worlds, as well as the emergent “structures” that arise from those interactions and things, not in order to explain, nor change the world, but to live in the world as a safe nurturing healthy place.
I.E. to know the dance we live, and to know we live the dance, and to dance that knowledge as we live, requiring acknowledgement of agency, mis-agency and responsibilities that then descend, rather than rights we have lost as orphans. Orphans have rights in a world that creates and allows orphans to exist, that is the stupidity of structuralisms in their narcissistic frames.
Generally orphans do not exist in the world, they exist in our worlds of effort that eschew agency, where we have failed to take up the challenge of being adults together, and fail to ask, “And this, or that, is it good worlding?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socius#:~:text=Socius%20may%20refer%20to%3A,rise%20to%20the%20word%20%22society%22
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691237428/the-colonial-origins-of-modern-social-thought
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_theory_of_risk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Douglas
re-written as post, less graphs, also big, the backlink is https://open.substack.com/pub/whyweshould/p/castles-in-the-air-a-high-dudgeon?r=p7471&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm going to be a pain in the rear here and point out that you're assuming that wearing a mask would slow the spread of COVID. This is simply not the case. Even the CDC (pre-2020) had dozens of studies showing that face masks simply do not stop the spread of viral diseases.
Refusing to do something that doesn't work isn't whiny.
You're not being a pain! My experience of conservatives complaining about masks has never been to appeal to studies, though. Can you cite a study that does indeed show masks are ineffective at slowing the spread of COVID?
I can't find what I was recalling offhand (information overload, sorry) - but I did some searching and came up with this review article which said that the evidence was weak:
And yes, I know that it's about influenza, not Covid, but they spread in the same way.
If COVID spread predominantly through droplet transmission, rather than aerosols, then the case for masking would be much stronger. But it doesn't, so it isn't.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/epidemiology-and-infection/article/face-masks-to-prevent-transmission-of-influenza-virus-a-systematic-review/64D368496EBDE0AFCC6639CCC9D8BC05
My standpoint is encapsulated by this sentence: "There is some evidence to support the wearing of masks or respirators during illness to protect others, and public health emphasis on mask wearing during illness may help to reduce influenza virus transmission."
I never wore a mask to keep *myself* safe; it was to encourage everyone to wear them, thus slowing transmission in order to reduce the rate of mutation and prevent hospitals from being overrun.
That word 'may' is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. And while I don't oppose you wearing your mask, I do oppose others insisting I wear one, and I do object to people calling me 'whiny' for rejecting thinly sourced evidence.
It don't think it's whiny to reject the efficacy of masks. People who whine are whiny.
Remember, I live in small town USA, where American flags wave proudly in the wind, and instead of A/S/L people ask "What church do you go to?" There are people in my social group who do much more than whine - they've also yelled at, honked at, and generally harassed people for wearing a mask.
I object to "using evidence of thin evidence to protect oneself from accusations of whiny". It red flags narcissism, if not in truth then in support for caring less about what worlds better, and more about conspiracy feelings as excuses for being justified in being a narcissist.
How to world better? Ask does it world better? Does a mask world better? If yes, even if poorly, then wear a mask. Turning mask wearing into a culture war battlefield is bad worlding by bad politicians.
BTW I live in Australia so any rights you may speak of, in reply, I do not have as a subject of King Charles.
I feel like I know Eric pretty well by now; I doubt he's a Narcissist. He strikes me more as a beleaguered tech worker with religious interests surrounded by intolerant liberals.
Also I still am not sure what "to world" means, but this comment helps give a sense; my current working definition is "to act in such a way as to influence the world in a way you like."