House of Eratosthenes

Although they pride themselves on being open-minded, liberals generally have far less contact with conservatives than conservatives do with liberals. As a result, their understanding of conservatives and conservatism is frequently a caricature. The problem is not simply that they disagree. It’s that they have little first-hand experience of whom or what they’re disagreeing with.

Yes, it ends with a dangling preposition. But there’s something to this anyway. Many’s the time I’ve been genuinely surprised, shocked even, upon discovering a liberal’s perception of his or her point of disagreement with those who disagree…like, myself for example.

Especially on the Inequality Thing. Within the liberal echo chamber, the perception of the conservative outlook is that inequality is desirable. CEOs who are “given” several hundred times more than their “workers” — yeah, sure, that’s how it’s supposed to be. A factor of several thousand times would be even better? What conservative actually thinks that?

Maybe they argued with a conservative who made the point, quite correctly, that if everything is equal within a battery then that’s just another way of saying it’s dead. That comes closest to my outlook on it; if your station in life is going to be some sort of constant regardless of what you do, then you might as well stay in bed and that’s how people are going to react. They’ll avoid extraordinary, uncomfortable efforts. Tell that to a proggie though, they’ll think you’re endorsing inequality — you’re saying society’s got to have these “haves” and “have-nots.” It’s the opposite of the truth because their coloring-book reality is a dystopia suffering from a painful lack of opportunity, and opportunity is central to the point the conservative is making. If the outcome is static and constant, there’s no opportunity. Doesn’t matter if the standard of living is high or low, people settle into a depression when they live like this. And they stop trying.

There are other examples, but a single specimen makes the point better than a lengthy listing, in this case.

Goldman continues:

Yet [Kevin] Drum misses the last and perhaps most important cause of liberals’ alienation from conservatives: their tendency to cluster in major metropolitan areas. I’m unaware of any study of the geographical distribution of ideological self-identification as such. But it does appear that Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to live in uncompetitive House districts.

Yes, there’s something: Liberals hug the coastlines, and wherever population is dense, for some reason. Which came first, the chicken or the egg? A greater population density makes people who live there liberal, or does it draw them into it from without? The consensus around the question at Quora is that the diverse backgrounds of the people who live there brings out a special sort of “tolerance,” which is only to be found in our friends, the liberals; this theory is invalidated by the experience of any conservatives who have come into contact with liberals, who found out they were conservatives. Nor does it gel with the observation above, made repeatedly elsewhere, that liberals are much more likely to stick to their own kind and shun contact with unbelievers. Yes I know that goes against the narrative. But that’s reality.

Let’s try this on for size: Liberalism requires population density. You can’t preen without an audience, and if this stuff we call “liberalism” is anything at all, it is a packaging contrary to the substance, a bit of phony showmanship, a carnival sideshow. Imagine doing work without an audience. Fixing a farm tractor out in a field, miles away from the nearest human being. Or, putting together a presentation for a meeting the next day, working very late in the office gathering data…the joys of PowerPoint. Or, you’re cleaning a gun and you want it to actually work next time you’re using it. Cleaning it, alone. Packing your parachute. Alone. Or, someone else’s parachute. You may vote like a lib, but in these situations you won’t be thinking that way. At least, I hope not…

If you’ve got a narrative that the tractor’s fine it’s just out of gas, but your experience tells you the tank is half full, the plugs are fouled — you are going to have to drop the narrative, which is something liberals cannot do.

Liberalism begins, and ends, with failure; failure and excuse-making. Excuses count if, and only if, someone is around to react in some way. When you have square miles per person instead of persons per square mile, this doesn’t fit. The tractor works or it doesn’t. Our current President does a great job of showing how this works. It’s embarrassing to listen to Him after awhile. Blah blah blah, mess I inherited blah blah blah…can’t even think properly anymore, He’s been subjected to too many environments in which words matter. Talked His mom into thinking He was actually putting the cookie back in the jar — got away with it, been getting away with it ever since. As a result, has to have the last word about everything, all of the time, and every speech is ninety minutes or more and is the Greatest Speech In All Of Human History. Every single one. But it doesn’t really work. Because where work matters, words don’t. President Obama represents liberals everywhere, who simply can’t function in any environment in which results speak for themselves. Nope. The speech has to do that, they know the results aren’t good enough.

There is an irony here: When the population density is lower, you’re actually more likely to encounter this coveted “diversity” because the encounters with your fellow humans, rare though they may be, are liberated from your own control. And when you do meet up with them it’s probably because 1) you need their help or 2) they need yours; this is something that isn’t true in more densely populated areas. Liberals have a lot of trouble with this concept, but when something is everywhere and all the time, people get tired of seeing whatever it is. That includes other people.

And as always, the real test of whether a liberal is “tolerant” of “diversity,” is a conservative. Liberals, generally, do not pass this test.

Two quick points:

1) Inequality causes evolution. Reducing inequality means slowing evolution. Why do you hate science?

2) Rush noted that in the Iowa caucuses, 60% of the Republican vote went to two Hispanics and an African-American, while 100% of the Democrat vote went to two very rich, very old, very white people. I love your population density theory, but every tv in those dense areas has to be turned to MSNBC to maintain the bubble. Otherwise, people might start looking at the evidence in front of their own lying eyes.
- Severian | 02/05/2016 @ 07:01
Let’s try this on for size: Liberalism requires population density.

I think this observation actually works much better with your concept of Architects and Medicators. To wit: Medicators require a certain critical mass or else there is nothing to Medicate. Architecture quite literally built the great cities; they only become heavily Medicated after that, and when they are over-Medicated, they turn into Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit, and require re-Architecture.

In a city, where everything’s already built up (literally and figuratively), there are other people who’ve picked up so much of everyone else’s slack that generating more slack actually becomes profitable. As it turns out, Architects need a little medicating when they’ve done their job so well as to put some of themselves somewhat out of business. The medication provides value in that context – but only in that context. You get full-on Medicators when they forget their context and decide that they know architecture better than anyone because they enjoy its benefits so much; rather like a person who thinks his frequent flier miles make him fit to spring out of business class and into the cockpit.

There aren’t too many Architects in the world. I, myself, don’t class myself that way; in a world where results matter immediately to daily survival, I would have to be coached up to make it. The world we have now affords me the luxury of making my living doing things that we couldn’t waste time on if everything went greasy-side-up tomorrow. So I consider my primary responsibility in life, first, is to just SEE THAT FOR WHAT IT IS, recognize it, understand it. Then, second, to make sure that I work as much like an Architect as I can even at my non-architectural task. Third, to use what secondary skills I have to promote and support their primary skills, so that what they build endures and isn’t undermined or defaced. The Architects have enough to do with keeping things in repair. If I do those three things well, the fourth thing ought to take care of itself – and that fourth thing is, for Crom’s sake stay out of the Architecture business.
- nightfly | 02/05/2016 @ 10:42
Yeah, this is why I gave up on playing the violin. There was a popular perception that I was very good at it, not best-of-the-best by any means, but much better than average. The truth was that I was much better than average only at those very few parts I felt like practicing. The rest of the time I was engaging in that great group-activity nurtured by the decidedly mediocre, of hiding behind the performance of everybody else. Yes, it’s a great excuse to say “everybody does it”; it’s what we’re taught, all day every day, from the very first time a first-grade or kindergarten teacher says “let’s see a show of hands.” Nothing you do is wrong if everybody else is doing it.

Hey, there’s a reason “solo performance” strikes fear into the heart of every band, orchestra & choir student. Can’t…can’t, well, we should have a verb for this shouldn’t we? It’s an important word, or would be one. Hiding one’s mediocrity and sloth behind the roughly-equivalent performances of others. There are many reasons why this stuff we today call “liberalism” “requires a population density”; this is probably the most important reason, with the preening-thing being perhaps a close second. Somewhere in there is your point: A lot of thinking like an Architect is avoiding what you don’t know how to do well, until such time as one knows how to do it, and confining one’s energies to those things one does well. In the presence of crowds, one can engage in that hallowed group-activity of pretending one knows everything there is to know, about everything about which something can be known. There would follow, if one were honest, that question to which I’ve alluded before: “When do we get to the fun part, you know, where I tell everybody what to do and then they go do it…”
- mkfreeberg | 02/06/2016 @ 04:22
Hiding one’s mediocrity and sloth behind the roughly-equivalent performances of others

A whole generation — at least — has been trained to exactly this by the educational establishment, and to call it success. A buddy who teaches college says that by far the most common question about essay assignments (after “how many pages should it be?”) is, “what do you want me to say?” As in, a kid will come by office hours to talk it over, and after the professor gives them a few suggestions or asks a few pointed questions, the student always comes back with some version of “so you want me to say that X.”

Now, I don’t expect that every student in every class should want to set the world on fire with brilliant insights on every assignment, but jeezy petes that’s pathetic. These kids — or, at least technically, young adults — have had it beaten into their skulls by twelve years of primary school that the whole point of “education” is to find out the teacher’s opinion, and parrot it back at him.

How can we expect open-mindedness out of a generation that has been trained to start sorting through a problem by running to an authority figure?
- Severian | 02/06/2016 @ 08:11

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