Mayfly Eight
The agency trap ~ Seismic shifts in geopolitics or crypto bugs crypto buggin’? ~ Kite Runners in the Winds of Change ~ Media vita in morte sumus ~ Shorts & followups ~ Amusement arcade
The agency trap
Can you pull yourself up by your bootstraps?
I have noticed that successful people often think their success is proof that success is possible for anyone.
They normally have their own origin story, with tough beginnings, and talk about how good decisions and hard work have got them to where they are today — and if you too work hard and make good decisions you too will be a success.
They prioritise personal endeavour, as we all should, but they don’t understand personal endeavour is not sufficient, nor even necessary, for success.
They cherish the idea of meritocracy, because it implies their success is earned, and has not come at the expense of someone else; or, if it did, someone else was less deserving.
It is rare they acknowledge luck (which is equally the absence of bad luck), or help, or any kind of facilitating or benevolent social or cultural structures.
They fail to recognise that they are, by definition, exceptional. We can’t all be above average.
They say you should pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. But think for just a moment and you realise the laws of physics are working against you. In fact the term originated as an example of an impossible task in a 19th century schoolbook.
It’s a strange combination of false humility (oh I’m nothing special, you could do it too) and pride (look what I achieved through force of will) which combines to degrade the less successful (you must just be dumb or lazy).
Meritocratic roulette
Meritocracy has come to be a cherished cross-party ideal in British politics.
Triumphant in 1997, Tony Blair said “The new Britain is a meritocracy where we break down the barriers of class, religion, race and culture.”
Almost 20 years later, Theresa May said “I want Britain to be the great meritocracy of the world…a country where everyone has a fair chance to go as far as their talent and their hard work will allow.”
All so inspiring and all so admirable (although close readers may note the shift from statement of current fact to statement of desired future).
In a good essay in the LRB, Stefan Collini teases out oft-overlooked flaws in the meritocratic ideal.
For a start our society simply isn’t meritocratic: “Study after study suggests that where people get to in life is largely determined by where they start…advantage is cumulative and self-perpetuating”.
But if it was considered a meritocracy, those who fall behind would be cast as responsible for their fate: not as victims of circumstance, but feckless and undeserving wastrels, warranting disdain.
Moreover, in a quirk of psychology, a real meritocracy is likely to spread mass resentment since almost all of us will be forced to accept we are subordinate on merit alone, and we have little chance of improving our lot. This is the theme of Michael Young’s 1950s dystopian satire, The Rise of The Meritocracy, which popularised the term.
(Funnily enough Michael later intervened to get his famously friendless son Toby into Oxford despite his grades not being up to scratch — having shown that meritocracy was not desirable, in this episode Michael also illustrates how distant a dream it is).
Collini’s concluding metaphor is the casino. Even knowing the odds are rigged in favour of the house, and that outcomes depend more on luck (often of birth) than skill or effort, people fantasise about winning in preference to leaving the casino or changing its rules.
The happiness industry
William Davies wrote a book called The Happiness Industry: how government and big business sold us well being. I have only read reviews, interviews, and discussion, but this is the story I take away:
If people can manage their happiness through yoga, breathing, CBT, CBD, SSRIs, organic vegetables, dairy substitutes, vitamin D supplements etc., then they are the ones to blame if they are not happy.
This sets up an industry that thrives on unhappiness without addressing twin truths:
happiness is not some sunlit upland that can be reached once and for all (not some destination>journey), and
many causes of unhappiness come from outside the individual.
The result being that the more we emphasise agency and the tools for personal happiness, the more we de-emphasise the role played by structures like the economy and society.
Or, in NY Times journalist David Marchese’s wording: “It’s like if someone was punching you in the face and their idea for how you might feel better about that situation is for you to learn to take a punch better, rather than they stop punching you in the face”.
The agency trap maintains the status quo
I have the sense that one of the purposes of the caste system, and Hindu philosophy in general, is to keep people in their place. That place is determined by some form of merit, perhaps from actions in a prior life. The world is a mirage, but you should act out your assigned role regardless.
Or, to put it a kinder way: in a world in which there is much suffering, and little opportunity for betterment, take solace from an eternal explanation of the state of affairs and from knowledge of your place within them.
(I’m no scholar on the subject and I apologise if I’ve butchered an ancient and rich philosophical tradition).
It seems to me that the same function — maintaining the status quo — is served by the combination of the impossible moral imperative to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, the meritocratic ideal, and the happiness industry (and you can throw in the myth of the American dream for good measure, too).
However the status quo is no longer eternally ordained, it becomes the fault of the individual. If your life is shit, you cannot blame society or chance, you can only blame yourself. If you want a better life, don’t try and change the world, change yourself.
In a counter-intuitive twist, the assertion of agency and the rhetoric of empowerment serve to make you look inwards, and dissuade you from engaging with wider changes that might really be necessary to assert your agency and power.
It’s another engine of individualism and atomisation at the expense of community. The emphasis on personal responsibility diminishes social responsibility, and sucks the wind out of the sails of progress…
(Of course, and this should go without saying, I am in no way arguing people have no responsibility for themselves, I am simply arguing that too much emphasis on that responsibility can have negative effects).
Next week, the myth of progress!
Seismic shifts in geopolitics, or crypto bugs crypto buggin’?
I feel it could be interesting to get my head around the geopolitical ramifications of the rise of cryptocurrencies.
There’s certainly something potent and destabilising about decentralisation and network effects removing power from central points like governments or banks.
It’s also kind of intriguing and contradictory that the people who are most attracted to this, tend to be the same people who promote nation states as an organising principle, and nationalism as an aesthetic. I haven’t unpicked that knot yet. Of course they also seem more likely to be climate change deniers, hence less concern about the inescapable energy handbrake.
Anyhow, four bits triggered this thought:
One. This week, Peter Thiel called Bitcoin a Chinese financial weapon: “It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the US dollar…[If] China’s long Bitcoin, perhaps from a geopolitical perspective, the US should be asking some tougher questions about exactly how that works.”
Two. Dave Troy (pun intended?), a “disinformation specialist”, put together a long thread which reads too much like conspiracy theory and would take too long to fully investigate and digest. The TL;DR takeaway is that he says a network of likeminded people, including those Koch brothers, are “shilling” for something bad to happen to the US dollar soon in an oblique attack on Biden as puppet of the deep state. (shilling is fast becoming a red flag word).
Three. Ruchir Sharma, a strategist at Morgan Stanley wrote in the FT: “This year’s rush to cryptocurrencies should serve as a warning to government money printers everywhere, particularly in the US. Do not assume that your traditional currencies are the only stores of value, or mediums of exchange, that people will ever trust. Tech-savvy people are not likely to stop looking for alternatives, until they find or invent one. And stepping in to regulate the digital currency boom, as some governments are already considering, may only accelerate this populist revolt.”
Four. Petrodollar warfare is an older hypothesis that says, since all oil is priced in dollars, all countries must maintain a stock of dollars, which supports the dollar at a higher relative value, and allows the US to borrow at lower interest rates than otherwise. Any attempt to price oil in other currencies or otherwise interfere with this cycle is blocked by violence: see Iraq, Iran, Libya Venezuela over the last 20 years. If this has been correct, what might moves to digital currencies trigger?
In the end this is all probably more FUD designed by holders of bitcoin etc. to pump the price of bitcoin etc. Even Troy says you might say “so what? gold bugs been goldbuggin’ since forever”.
Why the race report, continued
There’s a good analysis of the Race Report by Jonathan Portes, Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College London.
He convincingly destroys the methodology. Then he writes, using a favoured turn of phrase: “Some people were quick to accuse the Commission of ‘policy-based evidence making’ (instead of ‘evidence-based policy making’). I think this gives it too much credit as the Commission’s policy proposals are mostly sensible, unoriginal and inoffensive. Instead, the report is better viewed as ‘rhetoric-based evidence making’: the point was not to distort the evidence to provide a basis for specific policies, but to justify the sort of vitriolic hyperbole deployed by Professor Kaufmann when he says that it is a “major blow against institutional wokeness… the sacralisation of historically disadvantaged racial, sexual and gender minorities”.
Again, I’d go a little further, and suggest the report was also designed to foment the loud reaction to that position — the anti-anti-wokeness — as part of a process of further estranging ‘progressive’ voices from the working class.
Kite Runners in the Winds of Change
Several people had recommended the Winds of Change podcast to me. It explores whether the CIA, in an exercise of soft power, was responsible for the Scorpions’ hit song which became an anthem after the Berlin wall came down.
In doing so the podcast describes the CIA’s role in promoting Doctor Zhivago and its ‘performance’ as described by the Ben Affleck film Argo.
I’m only halfway through the series, and while it is entertaining and well made, it seems an inefficent way to transmit information, as podcasts often do. I’d have been able to read the content in a tenth of the time; but I wouldn’t have been able to read the content while jogging or driving so…
Anyhow it reminded me of a little of some questions I had a few years ago about Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, a popular novel and film. Here’s what I wrote:
The novel bothered me on first reading, mainly because of the enormity of the coincidence as it enters its final chapters…the villain of before reappears as the villain of now. This contrivance jarred with the rest of the narrative. It seemed awkward and forced, crass and childish, and unnecessary for the telling of the story. In the film, this episode came to seem even more implausible with the wig, violent escape, and remarkable emigration free of red tape.
After watching the film I found words for another source of discomfort that had only been lurking subconsciously before. The Taliban, in the person of the antagonist, are portrayed as rapists, paedophiles and sodomites. Throughout history the enemy other has always been slandered in terms like these. The resulting moral panic justifies any action against them and stifles discussion of that action. The blood libel of William of Norwich against Jews in the 12th century, or the 1321 poisoning plot alleged against lepers and Jews are just two examples.
In the Kite Runner, systematic child rape is introduced because the entirely modern labels of ‘racist’ and ‘misogynist’ apparently aren’t enough to fully stigmatise the Hazara-hating adulteress-stoning bad guy. Make him a paedo too.
And here is the second jarring contrivance. The Kite Runner was published in 2003, a time when the Taliban ‘insurgency’ following the 2001 Western invasion of Afghanistan was gathering strength.
How useful a tool is a novel like this to get the Sunday paper reading, dinner party debating, liberal peace-mongers onside for what was becoming an ever stickier war? We have to do what we’re doing, the Taliban are Evil.
The novel sold over seven million copies in the US alone and has been translated into 42 languages. Was Khaled Hosseini simply incredibly lucky, I wondered? Had his book arrived at exactly the right time to be swept up by popular opinion? Was this the zeitgeist or the collective unconscious at work?
I looked into it a little. The story started life as 25 pages about kite fighting, and had been rejected by Esquire and the New Yorker in 1999. Some time in 2001 ‘a friend’ suggested Hosseini expand it into a novel. The last third of the draft was then reworked by Hosseini’s editor Cindy Spiegel. Was this when the more implausible, more political elements were introduced? Hosseini said the novel became ‘this kind of a much darker, more involved tale than I had anticipated’. Once published, it was endorsed by Laura Bush, and by the Karzai-appointed ambassador to the US, Said Tayeb Jawad.
Is it too cynical to suggest there might have been motives, perhaps even beyond the author’s own, that drove the direction of the plot and maybe even contributed to the promotion and subsequent success of the novel and then film?
Media vita in morte sumus
In the midst of life we are in death.
An honest article in the Guardian about dying parents trying to have a good death, and how our choices can get ground down by the molars of an institutional machine.
This stuff needs to be talked about more. We used to know death. We would have had siblings who died around us, relatives would have died at home, we’d have seen and tended their bodies. Memento mori would be familiar.
Now death is consigned to the never never, taboo, behind funeral parlour curtains and swinging hopital doors, sanitised by hidden professionals.
Running away from death only makes it more frightening and more painful, and it denies us the chance of experiencing and growing through our own mortality. Maraṇasati anyone?
Shorts & followups
Apparently there is a novel about a woman who makes love to a bear.
It turns out I’m not as phantasic as I thought. I’m not quite aphantastic, but not far off. How about you?
In New Zealand, the central bank is considering attacking house prices, as reported in the FT. While I’m sure there’s no appetite for this in the UK, could it help with our fucked housing market?
Our Knowsys is suspect. There has been a replication crisis in medical and social sciences rendering many conclusions questionable. There is also a call to abandon the term “statistically significant” since it is almost always used incorrectly, as explained in this Aeon essay.
Amusement arcade
Visual
To Kill a King, Mike Barker — A film about Cromwell and Fairfax after the English Civil War. I just didn’t really get into it, I’m afraid, even though the performances and costumes were strong.
Southern Comfort, Walter Hill — Quite a silly film in a way, and I thought the opening was very wooden indeed and feared the worst. In the end though it was satisfying, mainly for the mood of the great Bayou locations and music. These mocked up posters give a good impression of the feel. The final scene below is worth watching if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.
Audio
James Williams Blades is a composer I nearly commissioned on a short film a few years back who does lovely stuff with a very now sound. I checked in and he’s doing very well for himself, even working with Beyoncé. Well worth a listen.
Inspired by the Southern Comfort film, I’ve listened to a lot of Dale Hawkins, and things like this…