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Quite unbelievably, the need for viewpoint diversity in academia and higher ed is still being debated, with some asserting that the growing push for viewpoint diversity is a MAGA plot that is fundamentally opposed to the aims of the academy.

The people making such arguments clearly don’t have a grasp of psychology and the overwhelming evidence which shows that (at least in politicized fields) an ideologically homogeneous academy and truth-seeking apparatus is fatally flawed—just look at the state of modern social science.

I have written before about how ideology seeps into research, and how political-ideological frameworks get embedded into social science through biases in framing, measurement, interpretation, selective citation, exaggeration, and ignored alternative hypotheses. And how, because of the underdetermination of theory in social sciences, the generation and selection of theory in the social sciences essentially amounts to a popularity contest. The ideological skew in social sciences means that the theories and conclusions most socially and emotionally desirable to leftists are amplified and canonized.

Some of the biggest theories and programs in social science (like stereotype threat, implicit bias, learning styles, exploratory/student-led learning, and whole-word literacy) were hurriedly canonized and treated as gospel for years because of their amenability to a leftist, social-justice worldview, but then they fell apart and failed to meaningfully replicate or to bring about their noble aims. Meanwhile, highly replicable and durable findings (such as stereotype accuracy) are ignored.

Much of this is driven by the explicit hypocrisy of some of the fields biggest names, who use their influence explicitly for dogmatic, activist purposes—NOT principled truth seeking—and who have a history of conducting highly dubious research.

Cognitive Chicanery: politically motivated selective demands for rigor

A recent piece by philosopher expertly laid out the argument for academic reform. Do go and read the whole piece, but the following quote caught my attention:

Even those conservative faculty who manage to get hired face another form of ideological discrimination due to politically motivated selective demands for rigor. Academics employ selective demands for rigor when they lower their standards for research they like politically and then ratchet up the standards for work that they disagree with.

This mention of selective demands for rigor reminded me of an article recently published by Cory Clark and colleagues, entitled “Morally offensive scientific findings activate cognitive chicanery”.

In it, the authors “document a mutually reinforcing set of belief-system defenses—cognitive chicanery—that transform “morally wrong” scientific claims into “empirically wrong” claims.”

In a series of experiments they showed that, when participants were presented with scientific studies that they find socio-morally (their term) undesirable or offensive, they engaged in a host of strategies to undermine the conclusions of those studies and protect their own beliefs.

It’s the cognitive, rhetorical equivalent of dancing through lasers to avoid some counter-evidence which might otherwise weaken your commitment to a strongly held dogma.

Though the study investigated these phenomena in members of the public, anyone familiar with the academic social sciences, and the many controversies that have plagued these fields, will recognize these strategies from peer review experiences, debates in the field, conversations with coworkers, etc.

The strategies for Belief-System Defence

Clark et al. identified a host of strategies that people (and academics) use to defend their belief systems and to undermine scientific results that they find morally objectionable. It’s well known that when something offends or conflicts with our moral or political worldview, people usually don’t appraise it openly and rationally, we simply become more slippery; wriggling away from the uncomfortable awareness that our sacred principles and our worldview may be wrong.

The authors call this whole suite of avoidance behaviors cognitive chicanery. It’s the mental gymnastics people do to protect cherished beliefs without ever admitting that’s what they’re doing. It’s Ideological Neo, stopping any disconfirming or confronting evidence from slamming into his noggin.

1. Motivated Confusion: “I can’t even understand this.”

This is the “strategic use of [feigned] ignorance”, also called dismissive incomprehension.

When findings challenge someone’s worldview, the writing magically becomes “unclear,” “confusing,” or “poorly explained”. The confusion likely isn’t genuine; its a feigned confusion. It’s a defense mechanism masquerading as a lack of comprehension.

From the paper:

Rather than reflecting a genuine lack of understanding or seeking clarification with the hope of fostering engagement, the aim of claiming incomprehension is the opposite: to publicly delegitimize speakers by alleging that the research is too incoherent to warrant serious consideration.

Almost 200 years ago, Schopenhauer proposed a similar idea: “If you know that you have no reply to the arguments which your opponent advances, you may, by a fine stroke of irony, declare yourself to be an incompetent judge: ‘What you now say passes my poor powers of comprehension; it may be all very true, but I can’t understand it, and I refrain from any expression of opinion on it.’ In this way you insinuate to the bystanders, with whom you are in good repute, that what your opponent says is nonsense.”

Relevant:

2. Motivated Postmodernism: “This question can’t even be studied.”

This is when a critic does not deny the conclusion, but the entire legitimacy of asking the question.

Suddenly they will claim that “The issue is too complex for science”, “You can’t quantify things like this”, or “Empirical data can’t capture lived experience”.

From the paper:

Critics may argue that certain lines of inquiry are conceptually misguided, that the phenomena in question are too subjective or socially constructed to be measured, or that the very act of reducing a morally charged issue to quantifiable data is ethically or politically objectionable. Our expectations rest on postmodern critiques of scientific knowledge, which question the assumption that phenomena can be meaningfully quantified or studied through positivist methodologies. Postmodernism, by its nature, challenges the assumption that objective reality can be captured through empirical methods, instead emphasizing the role of power, language, and social context in shaping knowledge…

By framing certain investigations as inherently flawed, oppressive, unanswerable, or not a matter for empirical research, individuals can justify the rejection of offensive scientific results seemingly on principle.

3. Contradictory Complaints

This is one of the funnier and more prolific set of strategies used by many people, (including academics). They carry a holster full of mutually contradictory critiques, leveraging whichever one is currently most useful, before switching to an entirely contradictory critique on the next issue if it serves them. They may even use many contradictory critiques at the same time.

The most obvious and common way this is done, by the intelligentsia especially, is to claim in one case that the sample size of a politically inconvenient study is too small, but then to turn around and dismiss large N studies because some anecdote, personal experience, or others’ “lived experience” says otherwise.

I remember seeing this done by many academics and pundits in New Zealand, when we had multiple reports about the dismal state of free speech and viewpoint diversity in our higher-ed institutions. Researchers who had no issue conducting and relying on studies with absolutely miniscule convenience samples (even samples of n=1… that one person literally being themselves—look up: autoethnography, and weep). These academics, who have spent years elevating tiny samples, anecdotes, and lived experience above data, suddenly found the modest convenience samples of the Free Speech surveys inadequate.

Clark et al. also found that the offensiveness of scientific findings were simultaneously associated with the contradictory claims that the scholars were unintelligent, but also that they are using their intelligence to manipulate people. Offensiveness was also associated with the claim that findings were “old news”, but also that the findings are preposterous. This is evidence that people will grasp for any and all strategies to undermine objectionable research even when those strategies are explicitly contradictory.

4. CIA Sabotage Tactics

Another funny one. For this aspect of the study, Clark et al. were inspired by the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which provides instruction on strategies which can be used to gum-up enemy organizations. These are strategies such as the weaponized demand for rigor, and weaponized ethical or procedural concerns.

One reading of this manual, after a long day of arduous meetings and review boards, battles with bureaucracy, and so on, will convince you that our institutions are actively being hamstrung by the deep-state or other bad actors.

Just read this from the Clark et al. study:

We test a small selection of strategies from their guidelines on interfering with organizations and production: “When possible, refer all matters to committees, for ‘further study and consideration’. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible. . . ”; “Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions”; and “Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.”

In peer review, ethical review, funding, and elsewhere, this kind of bureaucratic slow-walking and nitpicking is ubiquitous if your research is somewhat objectionable to the prevailing dogma.

Just look at ’s and other’s experiences with weaponized institutional review boards.

5. Schopenhauer’s Stratagems

Borrowed from Schopenhauer’s 19th-century manual on “being right even when you’re wrong,” these strategies for combating objectionable research include:

Extension: Exaggerating the claim to absurdity, or in Schop’s words: “carrying your opponent’s proposition beyond its natural limits. . . so as to exaggerate it”.

The obvious example here is taking some supposedly offensive claim about race/sex differences and say “but to assert that all members of one group are worse than all members of another group is patently false”.

This is extending the claim to absurdity in order to refute a claim that was never made (and also related to motivated ignorance: educated people pretending to not understand central tendency, distributions, and effect sizes).

Odious categorization: Labeling the research as extremist or dangerous, in Schop’s words: “If you are confronted with an assertion, there is a short way of getting rid of it… by putting it into some odious category; even though the connection is only apparent, or else of a loose character.”

This is to strategically label something “extremist”, “far right”, “…phobic”, and so on. This is a favored strategy of ideologues whose ideology rests on incredibly flimsy evidentiary bases. They instead rely on the slander and odious categorization, of opponents and their beliefs.

Ad personam: Pretty self-explanatory, related to odious categorization: “The authors of these findings are bigots.”

Viewpoint Diversity, Openness in Science

The authors conclude:

Across five studies, we found that when people were morally offended by scientific findings and experiencing desires to suppress those findings, they engaged in a host of cognitive evasion tactics. They were more likely to report that the writing was incomprehensible and that the question was beyond the purview of science. Later studies showed that moral offense and suppression desires also predicted endorsement of Schopenhauer’s stratagems for always being right, the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, and a potpourri of contradictory complaints (including the elevation of anecdotes above data and the sample size being too small, that the researchers are unintelligent and using their high intelligence to manipulate, and that the findings are both preposterous and old news). Experimental results, especially in later studies, suggest that all of these evaluations are likely motivated by desires to suppress morally offensive findings.

It’s how people turn a science into a pseudoscience, in order to prevent falsification of closely held dogmas.

These studies actually find that both right-wing people and left-wing people use such strategies. The authors say that “cognitive chicanery results from humans’ tendencies to justify the dismissal of dissonant claims with minimal effort”.

But the keyword there is human.

But proponents of viewpoint diversity like myself have never claimed that it’s only a left-wing phenomenon, or that a field composed entirely of conservatives would be any less biased.

We only assert that any field composed of humans who are universally leftists and who are all strongly ideologically aligned on a central set of dogmas, who wield institutional power, and who maintain a death grip on the academic and cultural Overton window, will be incredibly biased and unable to to produce valid research (at least on topics related to those central dogmas).

And it’s basically self-evident at this point that academia is composed “of people who share a deep interest in protecting cognitive and moral assets: including protecting them from inconvenient truths.”

Thus the reign of error will continue.

The evidence just keeps mounting.

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Some of my colleagues here in New Zealand1 recently published a paper in the journal Psychology of Men & Masculinities, which is getting some attention:

As summarized in this short critique of the paper by 2:

The researchers used a large New Zealand survey and grouped men using a statistical technique called latent profile analysis. They relied on eight indicators they believed reflected “toxic masculinity,” including:

• hostile sexism

• benevolent sexism

• narcissism

• disagreeableness

• opposition to domestic violence prevention spending

• social dominance orientation

• sexual prejudice

• gender identity centrality

Based on how men clustered on these measures, the authors identified five groups. Two of them—together totaling about 10% of the male population—were labeled toxic.

Specifically, the groups identified were labelled:

• Atoxic (35% of the sample)

• LGBT-tolerant Moderate (27%)

• Anti-lgbt Moderate (27%)

• Benevolent Toxic (7%)

• Hostile Toxic (3%)

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Before we move on, let me catch you up on the 5 items used in the benevolent sexism scale, as these will be relevant in a moment:

1. Women should be cherished and protected by men.

2. Women tend to have superior moral sensibility.

3. Many women possess a purity that few men have.

4. Every man ought to have a woman he adores.

5. Women tend to have more refined taste and culture than men.

Respondents rate their agreement/disagreement with these statements on a scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree) with 4 being neutral: “neither agree nor disagree”.

For this essay, I will ignore the whole critique around the dubious use of gender-neutral, asexual measures such as agreeableness, narcissism, and even gender identity centrality as indicators of toxic masculinity.

As mentioned above, based on response patterns and the results of the latent profile analysis, the authors identified 5 “groups”, as seen in the figure:

There are some serious issues with the interpretations of the different groups though.

First, the group labelled “Anti-LGBT moderate” gave an average response of “neither agree nor disagree” to the item asking whether participants thought “that homosexuality should be accepted by society”.

While, indeed, that is obviously not an outright expression of support for homosexuality, neither is it a response indicating “Anti-LGBT” attitudes. In polling and surveys, it is considered bad practice to impute the motives and meaning of non-respondents or people who choose the neutral item, without gathering more information first. The labelling of this group “Anti-LGBT” hardly seems appropriate or fair on participants. The authors took a neutral response, and artificially, presumptuously, labelled it an “anti” response.

Second, look at the responses on “benevolent sexism” for the groups. Apart from the Atoxic group, all the other groups respond essentially identically, right?

So why do the authors describe the two “Moderate” groups as scoring “low-to moderate” on this dimension, but then withhold such editorializing when it comes to the “Benevolent Toxic” group, describing them simply as scoring “highest on benevolent sexism”?

Ignoring the fact that all three of these groups here respond at the neutral midpoint (so on average, not endorsing benevolent sexism), does the difference shown above justify this interpretation of the data? Does it justify emphasizing that one of those groups scored higher than the other? And does responding at the neutral midpoint, so not really endorsing the items on average, justify labeling them toxic?

The problem is even worse regarding responses to the “hostile sexism” scale:

Three groups—the (supposedly) Anti-LGBT Moderates, the LGBT-Tolerant Moderates, and the Benevolent Toxics—score identically on the measure of hostile sexism.

Of these three groups who score identically (below the neutral midpoint, I might add—so, again, not even actually endorsing hostile sexism), the authors say that the two LGBT-related Moderate groups scored “low-to-moderate” on hostile sexism, while of the Benevolent Toxic group, the authors say they scored “moderate-to-high”.

Look at that cropped image above. Why would they describe those three responses to the hostile sexism scale differently? They literally scored identically. This is nothing more than an attempt to justify their classifications, despite the data not supporting their interpretation.

There is a broader issue here, with the notion of Benevolent Sexism in general. Remember, Benevolent Sexism is measured by the following items:

1. Women should be cherished and protected by men.

2. Women tend to have superior moral sensibility.

3. Many women possess a purity that few men have.

4. Every man ought to have a woman he adores.

5. Women tend to have more refined taste and culture than men.

These are items which the authors above reservedly admit are “positive in tone”.

So the application of traditional notions of sexism here seems dubious. However, researchers on benevolent sexism strain themselves in the attempt to turn this construct into “sexism”, by claiming that it shows that these men “view women stereotypically and in restricted roles”. This, despite the fact that none of the items ask about what participants think women’s roles should be, so such a claim is unfounded. The scale may indicate endorsement of stereotypes, but whether or not those stereotypes are accurate or not (or are damaging or not) is a much larger issue that does not get empirically treated in these studies, so again, the implied claims based on this “stereotype” content are not strongly supported. (They also ignore the fact that human beings are highly attuned instruments for detecting social realities and patterns in our social environments, which is why our stereotypes frequently turn out to be overwhelmingly accurate, for example: Across Cultures, Women Are More Empathetic Than Men).

But think about the logic of this scale, and the way it is used in research:

• The authors present a group of items expressing positive sentiment towards women.

• Men who endorse these items, so who explicitly endorse a positive sentiment towards women, are labelled sexist and toxic.

• Men who see these items expressing positive sentiments about women, and who respond “no” (or even “hell no!”), are labelled non-toxic or not-sexist. These are men who are explicitly rejecting positive notions about women.

So if I see the item ‘Women should be cherished and protected by men’, or ‘Many women possess a purity that few men have’, and I say “absolutely not!! women are evil” and put a tick in the box for 1-Strongly disagree, researchers will assume I am not sexist (because the theory goes that hostile ad benevolent sexism go together and support a generally sexist worldview).

But if I was to respond, “yea I guess so, I love women, they are purer than most men I know, and should be cherished and protected when appropriate” and thus I select 6-Agree, the researchers will think, “ooh, we might have a sexist here”.

Think of the most women-hating incel you can… how do you think he would respond to those benevolent sexism items? He would not agree with them. But how would his responses be labelled by masculinity researchers? Not sexist? Now think of a conservative Christian, who genuinely loves and cherishes the women in his life, albeit in a traditional manner. How would his endorsement of those items be classified? Sexist?

This is just another strategy used by social scientists to “stack the deck” and find pathology specifically in leftist-disfavored groups (conservatives, Christians, etc.) even when the data does not support it. “Researchers’ conclusions were driven by a priori assumptions, biased research procedures, and selective interpretation of evidence that “stacked the deck” in favor of finding” pathology only in certain groups.

Now, regarding the study discussed above, look at the Benevolent Sexism scores again:

All but one of the groups neither endorses nor disagrees with the benevolent sexism scale. Four groups respond at the midpoint. So they are essentially taking the neutral liberal position of “women are people, they aren’t in general good or bad overall”. Two of those groups are labeled toxic, and their responses here are used as supporting evidence of that.

In contrast, the only group in the entire study explicitly labelled “non-toxic” is the only group to read the positive sentiments about women and explicitly reject them (at least more than any of the other groups, they’re still close to the midpoint). Does that make much sense? Seems like there could be a argument there for some negativity against women, no? At least as much as those who respond neutrally!

Now I’m not saying those participants are toxic or sexist. But I am pointing out that there is a serious amount of mental gymnastics going on here that is buried under a mountain of questionable, ideological assumptions that are at least highly debatable.

If you don’t see the subtle insanity of someone who actively rejects positive sentiments about women being classified as less sexist than a guy who agrees with those positive sentiments about women, regardless of whether those positive sentiments rely on traditional stereotypes, you must not be paying attention!

There is some really strange interpretive work going on here, and it’s not coincidental. It’s a concerted effort to slander and discredit certain ways of thinking that leftist academics take issue with and would like to socially engineer out of people.

Side note: It’s worth noting here that only about 3 percent of the participants gave responses which can reasonably be interpreted as toxic (though even their responses were relatively moderate, and there is no actual behavioral evidence showing these individuals manifest actual pathological behaviour). This 3 percent of people may indeed be true “toxics”, but it is also often shown that a small percentage of respondents do just like to select the craziest or most extreme answers, just for a laugh or to mess with the research project. As stated by Scott Alexander, around 4% of research responses engage in malicious or deceptive responding, and it’s always the most “extreme” responses which are most suspect. So the degree to which the authors have accurately identified the true psychological profile of “toxic men” is still dubious.

While the authors ostensibly want to improve the discourse around masculinity, and even initially point out some of the issues and downsides of “toxic masculinity” research, they are at pains to jump through hoops to justify the continued use of the term “toxic” to describe a traditional form of masculinity that shows basically no indication of any sort of serious behavioral pathology.

The group labelled Benevolent Toxic showed low hostile sexism scores, neutral benevolent sexism, low Social Dominance, etc. However, they expressed a skepticism about homosexuality in society (in response to one catch-all item, I suspect there would be nuance here if it had been measured more expansively).

And that seems to be the crux of the issue, at least for the so-called Benevolent Toxics. They score about the same way everyone else does, except they are more skeptical of homosexuality discourses in society, which is enough to label them “toxic”.

This isn’t a scientific classification of people so much as it is an attempt, rightly or wrongly, to label certain beliefs and attitudes toxic, and to push them out of the Overton window.

It is not objective science.

Another way you can tell all this is not genuine science is to look into a few of the other claims made in that article.

Here’s one:

On page 108, the authors say that

Newman et al. (2023) found that young Black men in urban settings are at risk of developing toxic masculine identities due to structural racism.

This subtly hints at a major problem faced (if they would only face it) by “masculinities” academics: they hate traditional/toxic masculinity, but such masculinity is much more widespread in all of the sacred communities that most academics worship. So, as in that quote, they are at pains to say this is all caused by “structural racism”.

But fine—that may be true!

Let’s take a look then, and see if Newman did indeed “find” (which is sneaky academic speak for trying to make you think it was conclusively “proven”) that Black men are more toxically masculine because of structural racism.

The Newman article referred to is this one:

It appears that this article does not investigate whether structural racism causes toxic masculinity in Black people. It is simply conducts interviews, with 14 youth, around “the importance of a masculine identity; depict[ions of] masculinity through key attributes (leadership, persistence, responsibility, confidence, strength) and… the intersectional influence of race, faith, athletics and adult role models.”

It appears the claim in our original article above, that “structural racism causes toxic masculinity” was simply lifted from the article’s abstract and first sentence:

The evidence for this is not actually presented in this article (despite the fact that it was the article cited by our original study when making the claim). The actual evidence appears to be located one step further back, in another article by Newman from 2021.

So lets go look at that one!

Here it is:

Again, another interview study of 14 youth, and 10 sport coaches.

The authors state at the end of the first page:

Due to systemic racism and false stereotypes, urban male youth, particularly male youth of color, are at risk for the development of negative self-identities.

This time there is no citation at all. And the original claim is not even what the article itself is investigating. It sheds no light on this causal relationship between structural racism and toxic masculinity.

So go all the way back to our first article and this claim:

We have gone two layers deep into the literature cited in support, and not found even a single piece of actual evidence for that claim. To prove such a claim one would need to prove the presence of structural racism, which the cited articles do not do, and which is not as easy as one thinks—in the end comes down to one’s personal philosophical outlook and interpretation of data. Then one would also need to perform a complex causal analyses to prove that the presence of such structural racism is the ultimate cause of higher rates of toxic or hegemonic masculinity in Black men.

But none of that is provided. They simply make the claim, throw in a random citation, and they know people will assume that it’s been conclusively proven!

It’s just empty citation laundering posing as scientific analysis for the purpose of leftist propaganda and social engineering.

This lack of actual data and lack of supporting evidence is true all throughout the masculinity literature. Look at this excerpt on benevolent sexism:

Not a single piece of evidence to support the notion that “men have power over women”, it’s simply presented as a given. If we men do have power over women, I would love for any of my readers to comment below and tell me how.

I am in a LTR, and I cannot for the life of me think of any domain in which I have power over my fiancé, aside from my natural biological strength advantage (which the state—with its true power—and social norms prevent me from using against her, or else face severe punishment). But it is presented as a conclusively proven statement that men have power over women.

It is also claimed, based on pure assumption, that men who endorse the positive “benevolent sexism” sentiments do so to engage in ideological dominance over women (evidence and source not provided), that endorsing such items implies that those men think women “can’t provide for themselves” (evidence not provided), or that men’s power over women (evidence of which not provided) is justified because they believe that women need men’s guidance (evidence not provided). There is no empirical investigation being cited to support such claims.

It’s pure rhetoric. Propaganda. Not science.

This “benevolent sexism” theory is an attempt to protect the “patriarchy myth” from the mounting counter-evidence, such as this large study which showed that:

…no matter what the race, class or sex of the participant making the ratings, there was a strong tendency to associate women with positive attributes and men with negative attributes.

The Benevolent Sexism program is an attempt to reframe that pro-female bias into a nefarious phenomenon by men secretly aiming to continue the subjugation and domination of women, because the entire political project of the researchers is built on that premise.

Again, this is not objective science. It is propaganda aimed to manipulate people to accept social-justice-leftists views on society, and to make us amenable to broadscale social reforms that we would otherwise not accept.

That study (in the last screenshot, above) actually performs a simple experiment, with a complex statistical analyses (vastly statistically underpowered), to make claims about “sequential effects”. That is to say, they propose to show that one manipulation affected another variable through another variable and finally influenced the final variable, with a clearly implied chain of transmitted effects. This despite the fact that the outcomes were all measured at the same time—cross sectionally.

These mediation analyses are not capable of supporting the kinds of claims made in studies like this. After the threat manipulation, all of the other variables were simply measured at the same time. So claims about how effects transmit through each other to affect variables down the line are not valid.

It does not reflect well on the study that it uses very weak laboratory experiments with pretty transparent manipulations, and “measures of aggression” which are simply word completion tasks, of the kind I exposed here:

Throughout the article the authors reference other works which used the word completion task, which in turn cite other works, and which all make assertions about the validity of the task, however I could not actually find a paper that showed that this task actually relates to aggressive behavior as the authors claim above.

There is no evidence anywhere, that I can see, which shows that the word completion task is a valid measure of aggression or aggressive cognition.

Again, almost none of the studies cited to support the claims are actually capable of validly supporting the conclusions. It’s the “Wolves of Campus Street” laundering ideas and ideology and inflating their egos and their ideology and selling it to young people, making off with money, research funds, social prestige, and so on:

In my other piece on the fragile masculinity research, I ended on this pessimistic note:

it as an overwhelming, exhausting gish-gallop of poor work, unjustified assumptions, and ignored alternative hypotheses. For every article like this one that you find flaws in, the authors cite 50 others. So you look into those studies, too, and find more flaws and more citations to other flawed work. And they’re full of unjustified assumptions and invalid measurement, weak manipulations, or suspicious analysis.

…

There is no way to combat these huge bodies of literature built on flawed assumptions, flawed theory, and flawed methods, which all cite each other and support each other. There has been decades of accumulation here.

So much of psychology is like this—a clear gish-gallop technique used to build theories and support worldviews which don’t stand up to scrutiny, but which are nigh on impossible to refute because of the sheer amount of research, and the complexity of the citation laundering.

But these types of studies get attention, they earn the authors grants and awards, they make it through peer review, and they are used to support all sorts of theories and claims about masculinity, patriarchy, aggression, gender norms.

…

Remember, never EVER take at face value the findings of ANY study in social psychology [especially on politicized issues]. Almost the entire field is run by ideologues with clear bias.

It’s a house of cards. A progressive propaganda machine designed only to advance a certain leftist-orthodox worldview.

And I end this article feeling the exact same.

I started to poke around the literature reported in the main study discussed at the beginning of this article. Going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole, trying to find actual supporting evidence in the cited literature.

And there is a lot to look into:

But after a short amount of time chasing ghosts, I run out of steam. The gish-gallop is effective.

I get lost in the rabbit holes of citations to other articles with other citations to other articles, to find articles mischaracterized, articles which perform highly dubious analyses, with no open data or open science, with miniscule samples, which completely ignore plausible alternative hypotheses, which make leaps of interpretation in order to advance a sociopolitical goal, and so on.

As perfectly described by Smith:

From an idealized understanding of science, the recurrence of these issues may seem puzzling as we should expect theories of a given phenomenon to be self-correcting over time.

However, genuine theoretical progress is impeded by a social scientific milieu in which practitioners are relatively ideologically homogenous, share strong extrascientific normative commitments, address highly politicized subject matter, and are unlikely to empathize with research subjects.

To the extent that social scientists operate as partisan actors, the development and success of social scientific theories may be better explained by the dynamics of partisanship reviewed above than of science. Effectively, social scientific claims themselves may take the form of propagandistic biases rather than empirically grounded statements about social reality.

And that’s what we have!

A scientific apparatus designed to malign one of the most productive, constructive, positive forces in the human world (masculinity), to further drive a wedge between the sexes, to antagonize the sexes, to marginalize anything traditional and healthy in favor of anything historically socially deviant.

For what purpose, I don’t know.

I cant think properly with this tinfoil on my head… but I have some ideas.

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And it reminded me of something I have puzzled over for a long time: Leftists love collectivism, but they appear to know little about it. They certainly don’t appear to realize that most research on collectivist societies shows that it is almost always completely opposed to everything they value.

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The term "collectivism" conjures a warm image in popular leftist discourse, as indicated by Mamdani’s quote. It conjures images of equity, generosity, mutual aid, community solidarity, openness, and progressivism. Collectivism is thus presented as a viable antidote, for leftists, to individualism and capitalism, and as a path toward a more open and equitable society.

A closer look reveals that the forms it takes in the real world are often starkly different from, and even opposed to, the conceptions of collectivism held by leftists, and it’s often directly opposed to the ideals they champion.

This is not simply a “look at the mountain of bodies political collectivism leaves in its wake”2 argument, which has been rehashed over and over. Rather, I want to point out that even mushy notions of Eastern style cultural collectivism are in direct opposition to leftists ideals.

It might help here to differentiate between these two general levels or types of collectivism.

Political Collectivism

We could call the first type “political collectivism”, or “institutional collectivism”. This is criticized frequently, so I won’t give it much attention here.

This is the top-down, state-enforced system where the individual is legally subordinate to a larger, truly collective identity—the state, the party, or the nation. Historically, this is the collectivism of communism and fascism. It’s pretty well depicted in this tweet:

As political theory and history demonstrate, this form of collectivism is inherently authoritarian, violent, and coercive. Because of the diverging interests of individuals—and the inherent flaws of planned economies and societies—it cannot be achieved voluntarily on a mass scale. It requires the use of centralized raw power, military, and police to suppress individual property rights, autonomy, freedom, dissent, free speech, and so on.

The horror of this sort of collectivism is so well known, and it has been so thoroughly debunked that we don’t really need to deal with it.

Leftist skirt this issue anyway, by mostly denouncing this extreme form of collectivism, by dressing up their conceptions of collectivism in the flowery, warm language of the second broad type of collectivism:

Cultural Collectivism

This type of collectivism is less political, and more socio-cultural3. It includes relational collectivism (kin-based), network collectivism (tribal, village, etc.—based on strong ties but not necessarily familial), and attribute collectivism (broader again, collectivism based on particular attributes: ethnicity, religion).

This is the type of collectivism that appears so attractive to western leftists. It is easily dressed up in the language of kindness rather than power. It conjures images of communes and close-knit yet diverse communities in which everyone works for the good of everyone else, but everyone is also somehow free to be and do whatever they want. It is often studied in Eastern, Latin American, or African contexts, giving it the exotic air of non-western, magical, noble cultures that leftists love to falsely invoke so much.

However, here is where leftist notions collide with reality: data shows that even cultural collectivism is frequently entirely at odds with leftist values.

I am necessarily going to simplify and overlook nuances and distinctions here, but the general image I paint is true. Look at the annotated reference list at the end of this article for key findings supporting this argument.

Collectivist cultures face very similar practical constraints and flaws as collectivist political systems. That is to say, in order to function as a collective, and in order for the concepts and culture underpinning the collective to be maintained, freedom must be limited, power must be exercised, and rules and norms must be strongly enforced.

Leftists are obsessed with "diversity", yet if you look at collectivist cultures around the world, they are all highly conservative and they do not tolerate diversity, deviance, or dissent nearly as much as individualist cultures. By their very definition, collectivist cultures require everyone to follow the same program. This often means enforced gender roles, enforced respect for elders, strong hierarchy, a lack of social mobility, strict religious and cultural practices, commitment to tradition, and so on… Not things that leftists typically approve of (they generally hate norms and social roles, they hate their elders, they hate religion, they hate tradition, they want the freedom to abandon their family for minor inconveniences or political differences, etc.).

Leftists look at some collectivist cultures around the world and see, for example, that some may be accepting of particular forms of a “third gender” or “trans”-type personalities, and assume that this means these cultures must surely be paragons of openness and liberality. Well, they aren’t—and the fact that such small features are so powerfully blinding to leftists is simply evidence of their monomania around gender.

Collectivist cultures ruthlessly leverage potent social technologies for maintaining order: social shaming, social surveillance, threat of ostracism, coercion, obligation, enforced reciprocity, and Machiavellian manipulation are often shown to be more prevalent in collectivist cultures.

These strategies are used in collectivist cultures in order to suppress individuals’ desires, differences, and dissent in order to ensure people follow tradition, don’t deviate from (and thus undermine) the collective cultural models, and do what is “best” for the group (ironically, it’s often not actually what is best. If you look at various indicators of social, economic, and political wellbeing, collectivist cultures generally are worse off than individualist ones).

Corruption

One of the most significant clashes with leftist morality is the issue of corruption4.

In collectivist cultures, your primary moral duty is to your family, your village, to your co-ethnics or co-religionists (depending on the type of collectivism)—not to some universal liberal ideals of openness, procedural fairness, or justice.

What an individualist society calls corruption, a collectivist society often views as one’s moral duty. What Westerners call "nepotism" (leftists in the West love to gripe online about nepo-babies in Hollywood, or rich people who buy their kids’ way into prestigious institutions, for example) is often viewed, in collectivist societies, as the fulfillment of ones moral obligation to use whatever strategies one can in order to help members of the in-group collective. And very often, shaming, punishment, manipulation, and gossip are used to ensure that people fulfill these obligations to in-group members, who are pressured to do what is necessary to not lose their standing as a good member who is committed to the in-group.

If you are a government official or bureaucrat in a collectivist culture, and a family member or tribe member needs a job, or say if one of your job applicants is a co-religionist, it is your obligation—and there is immense social pressure—to give that person the job, even if they may be underqualified or if doing so means violating principles of fairness. You see this kind of corruption everywhere in collectivist cultures.

An ugly side to this cultural collectivism is also that, due to the coevolution of in-group favoritism and out-group prejudice, intergroup hostility is actually often more pronounced in so-called collectivist cultures.

Remember, in collectivist cultures, loyalty is to the collective and it’s members first, and the collective is never humanity in general; humans did not evolve for that, and it is very hard to achieve while in the “hive” mode—only Western individualism gets close.

By loosening identity-based affiliations underlying so-called collectives, individualism gets closer to leftist notions of global collectivism because EVERYONE is an individual, but only some people are the same race/tribe/family as you. So if we are committed to respecting individuals and freedom, we come closer to a truly all-encompassing collectivism, in which everyone is a member of the group. It’s paradoxical and confusing, but its true.

The Irony

Overall, leftists—if they don’t ascribe to a full-blown political collectivism—ascribe to a mythical form of cultural collectivism that doesn’t really exist. If any collectivist cultures do come close to the myth, it is only because their incredibly small scale and isolation allows them to avoid a number of collective problems that larger societies face. You can bet that if their numbers increased and they were frequently in touch with other groups, the “collectivism” would manifest as intergroup hostility, prejudice, and so on, all to protect their “collective”.

It’s ironic; if you look at the global data, the collectivism that leftists love so much is closer to old-school tribalism, traditionalism, religionism, and racialism. It requires qualities that leftists clearly demonstrate a hatred of—commitment to family, to tradition, fulfilment of social roles, self-denial, respect for elders. In collectivist cultures, you cant abandon your family because they’re too traditional or don’t share your politics. You can’t decide you don’t want to follow to social program. You will be pressured to have kids. You can’t take endless mental health days and decide you don’t want to work because of your anxiety—the collective requires you to be productive and work for the good of the group! It facilitates everything that leftists ostensibly oppose so strongly—nepotism, corruption, social conservatism, familial and religious and cultural prejudice, etc.

The irony is that the only culture that actually comes close to achieving the mythical leftist utopia in which people simultaneously thrive economically, are free to dissent and deviate, to sever and then and create new social ties, to care for their mental health and nurture their own desires even if it means becoming a burden to the collective, and to extend the cooperative instinct far beyond the usual human boundaries—is Western-style individualism and market-based societies.

It is plainly obvious from the available data; data on corruption, health data, wellbeing data, economic indicators, crime data (including crimes of violence, abuse, etc.), that “individualist” societies are more liberal, more progressive, are better at facilitating large-scale cooperation, and are better at bringing us close to leftist ideals of freedom and equality than any so-called collective ones.

But as with many economic concepts, leftists seem to have a mental block wherein they can’t fathom that actions which don’t bear kind-sounding names and which appear to be counterproductive to their goals on the surface, when applied to a large scale, actually bring about the desired productive and positive phenomena as emergent properties. This is true of market economies, it is also true of cultural individualism.

If leftists could avoid the nominal fallacy, they would realize that, despite its name, “collectivism” in practice usually actually stifles diversity, works against ideals of universalism and equality, and encourages tribalism, corruption, and intergroup prejudice.

Note: To avoid spending days writing this into a long-ass piece, which I couldn’t be bothered to do, I necessarily ignored some complexities around vertical vs horizontal collectivist cultures, tight and loose collectivism, etc. But it doesn’t really matter because the point stands: Individualist societies do better at facilitating the kind of social change that progressives ostensibly want, and collectivist cultures frequently display higher rates of all the things that progressives ostensibly stand against.

That hasn’t prevented leftists from activating for collectivism though. Maybe it’s because they are motivated more by an oikophobic instinct than an actual desire to achieve progressive outcomes. Go figure.

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Sources:

Here is a short list of articles with some data supporting the argument above, that I had Gemini help with:

Mazar, N., & Aggarwal, P. (2011). “Greasing the Palm: Can Collectivism Promote Bribery?”

• Link to Paper

• Key Finding: Using cross-national data and experimental priming, the authors found that collectivist mindsets lead individuals to feel less personally responsible for their actions. This “shared responsibility” makes it psychologically easier to offer bribes compared to individualists, who feel the weight of personal moral agency.

• “Together, these results suggest that collectivism promotes bribery through lower perceived responsibility for one’s actions.”

Triandis, H. C., et al. (2001). “Culture and deception in business negotiations”.

• Link to Paper

• “cultural collectivism was positively related to reported use of deception in negotiations”

Jha, C. K., & Panda, B. (2017). “Individualism and Corruption: A Cross-Country Analysis.”

• Link to Paper

• “We find that more individualistic countries have lower levels of corruption (perception). This relationship is robust to the inclusion of a rich set of control variables and to the use of alternative measures of corruption.”

Zheng, X., et al. (2013). “Collectivism and corruption in bank lending.”

• Link to Paper

  

  

Fessler, D. M. (2004). “Shame in Two Cultures: Implications for Evolutionary Approaches.” World Cultures, 15(1), 37–62.

• Link to Paper

• Key Finding: Contrasts “Guilt Cultures” with “Shame Cultures.” It finds that in collectivist settings, shame is a primary tool for social regulation used to maintain rank and subordinance.

• Collectivists frequently feel shame, and show a major concern for how others perceive them, a strong desire to follow social norms, standards, and traditions to avoid shame, and so on.

• Individualists more often discuss guilt, a feeling of “remorse or regret; Often stem from inflicting harm on another; Often involve a desire to compensate the victim, apologize, and/or punish the self; Little or no evidence of concern with others’ negative opinions of the actor; Little or no emphasis on public nature of failure, no evidence of a desire to avoid visibility, no reports of shrinking, feeling small, etc.”

• On Shame vs Guilt cultures, one can see the dimension of collectivism vs individualism underlying these:

  

Sznycer, D., et al. (2018). “Cross-cultural differences and similarities in proneness to shame.”

• Key Finding: Shows that the shame-threat (the degree to which you fear being shamed) is calibrated to the local social network. In collectivist societies, the valuation of an individual is entirely dependent on their standing in the group, making social shaming an existential threat.

Douarin, E., & Amini, C. (2020). “Individualism and attitudes towards reporting corruption: Evidence from post-communist economies.”

• Link to Paper

• Key Finding: Found that individuals with higher individualist values are significantly more likely to blow the whistle on corruption. In collectivist settings, the “penalty of being ostracized” by the group prevents people from acting against corrupt leaders or kin.

• “Our findings indicate that individualism is associated with a greater likelihood to act against corruption. The effect estimated is small but highly significant and robust to changes in estimators and specifications. We also find evidence that institutional trust and individualism strengthen each other to generate greater willingness to report corruption.”

• “We find a consistent positive association between individualism and the likelihood of reporting corruption, the belief that others will report it and the notion that ordinary citizens can do something to tackle corruption.”

• “A key policy-relevant implication of our analysis is that anti-corruption measures are more likely to be effective where individualistic values are widespread”

  

  

Tu, Y., et al. (2020). “Collectivist traits and tolerance of public corruption.”

• Key Finding: Explains that collectivism creates a moral decoupling. People can be highly “moral” and “loyal” within their family (relational collectivism) while being completely indifferent to corruption and the theft of public or state resources, because the state and other citizens are seen as a foreign “out-group.” Collectivism was positively related to corruption tolerance, engaging in corruption, and less willingness to engage in anti-corruption efforts.

Pillay, S., & Dorasamy, N. (2010). “Linking cultural dimensions with the nature of corruption: An institutional theory perspective”

Gorodnichenko, Y., & Roland, G. (2011). “Which Dimensions of Culture Matter for Long-Run Growth?” American Economic Review, 101(3), 492–498.

• Link to Paper

• Key Finding: This is a major study showing that individualism is the strongest cultural predictor of long-run growth. The authors argue that collectivist cultures stifle “innovation-led growth” because they discourage individuals from standing out or challenging the status quo.

Klasing, M. J. (2013). “Cultural Dimensions, Collective Values and their Importance for Institutions”

• Key Finding: In "horse race" regressions against other cultural variables like trust, religious adherence, and generalized morality, individualism remains the only robust predictor of institutional quality.

• Individualistic societies lack the strong informal social networks used by collectivistic societies to enforce contracts. Consequently, they are more likely to establish formal institutions to protect individual property rights and facilitate anonymous market exchange.

• These societies place a higher value on pursuing individual interests, leading them to create systems that reduce the abuse of governmental and bureaucratic power.

Davis & Williamson, 2016. Does individualism promote gender equality?

Key findings:

Davis & Dutta (2016). “Individualism and Economic Freedom”

• Key Finding: “we provide evidence that individualism has a large, positive, robust relationship to the EFI. In our baseline regression, a one- standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with a 0.65 standard deviation increase in economic freedom. The relationship between individualism and economic freedom is robust to the use of alternative measures of individualism and to the introduction of a wide variety of controls related to geography, colonial and political history, social disparities, natural resource abundance, the level of economic development, formal legal and political institutions, and a wide range of cultural values and cultural aggregates.”

Diener, E., et al. (1995). “Factors Predicting the Subjective Well-Being of Nations.”

• Link to Paper

• Key Finding: In a massive cross-national study, the authors found that Individualism is more strongly correlated with happiness than almost any other variable, including income. People in collectivist cultures report lower life satisfaction because their personal goals are constantly sacrificed for the group.

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations. (2nd ed.).

• Key Finding: Hofstede notes that in collectivist societies, there is a lower press freedom and higher levels of state intervention. He explicitly links collectivism to lower per capita GDP.

• Hofstede noted that Individualism is often inversely related to Power Distance. Cultures that emphasize individual autonomy (High Individualism) frequently reject large, unquestioned hierarchies (Low Power Distance), whereas collectivist societies are more likely to accept hierarchical structures as a means of maintaining group harmony.

Welzel, C. (2013). Freedom Rising: Human Empowerment and the Quest for Emancipation. Cambridge University Press.

• Key Finding: Welzel’s research shows that as societies move from “Survival Values” (Collectivist) to “Self-Expression Values” (Individualist), human agency and objective life quality increase. He argues that collectivism is a “defensive” strategy for poor environments, but it eventually becomes a barrier to true human flourishing.

  ---

One of my all-time favorite philosophers, , had in large part managed to resist this deep-seated masturbatory urge—until now. Heath2 recently wrote a piece called “Populism fast and slow” in which he analogises the difference between modern progressivism and right-wing populism to the difference between System 1 and System 2 thinking.

Heath essentially argues that right-wing populism (or populism broadly though he doesn’t discuss left-wing iterations) relies entirely on System 1 thinking (fast, intuitive, more prone to error, susceptible to misinformation, etc.), whereas modern progressivism is broadly based on System 2 thinking (slow, complex, analytical). This is despite the fact that the dual process theory of cognition (the tidy System 1 vs System 2 model) is great for narrative building in this way, and for capturing audiences with interesting, intuitively pleasing “examples” and fun little number games, it is built on research subject to incredibly poor replicability.

To describe how System 1 thinking can lead to intuitive but erroneous conclusions, Heath takes a quick detour into another uncharacteristically poor argument—that the phenomenon of regression to the mean shows that common beliefs about the efficacy of punishment for bad behavior and reward for good behavior are illusory and misguided.

He presents no evidence or data supporting the notion that bad behaviour and deviancy is subject to regression to the mean, nor that people are led by this phenomenon to erroneously decide that rewarding good behavior is counterproductive, or that punishing bad behavior is unduly productive.

He bases this notion on an equally terrible quote from Kahneman, in which he lets an interesting statistical artefact massage his progressive sensibilities [yes I know he’s a Nobel prize winner, doesn’t mean I don’t know a bad argument when I see one]: “This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them.”

Heath says,

“Because of this, people who actually study behavioural change, by keeping records, tracking performance, and analyzing the relation to reward/punishment, wind up developing beliefs that contradict common sense. This is true not just of social scientists, but even animal trainers. They all tend to agree that reward is at least as effective as punishment, and in some cases more so. This generates an important décalage between expert opinion and public culture.”

However, he is missing a huge argument against using rewards as the basis for incentivizing good behavior, in that we can’t afford to pay everyone every time they don’t do something bad. Society can’t reward me every time I get angry and don’t beat my girlfriend—how would that even work? How can society reward me every time I choose not to do something wrong? Or does rewarding me for a good thing I did in one realm somehow prevent me from doing evil in some other realm? Can rewarding me for being nice to my girlfriend prevent me from stealing? How does a society based on rewards even work? Constraints dictate that society must largely be set up around punishing people when they transgress, regardless of whether rewards work better when training a dog to “shake”.

Therefore this is a terrible example for Heath’s thesis, and shows that very often the super smart System 2 people do discover interesting and unique factoids about the brain or intuitions or animal training or whatever, but these do not in any way discredit us poor dummies’ intuitions about how to structure society.

Heath himself admits as much, saying

“there are many cases in which the people are right to distrust elites. Analytical reasoning is sometimes a poor substitute for intuitive cognition. There is a vast literature detailing the hubris of modern rationalism.”

However, this is just serves as an obligatory, dismissive, due-diligence admission that elites are not perfect (but rest-assured, they’re closer to perfection than you). He goes on to claim that the various “consensuses” among the so-called “cognitive elite’, makes non-elites feel left out which “generates anger and resentment, which grows over time”.

But he simply takes it as a given that where you find a consensus among this holy elite, you can rest assured that said consensus has arisen purely through rational, analytical, System 2 thinking rather than simply arising from the intuitions and sensibilities of people who ascribe to a particular worldview, and who just happen to have aggregated in certain institutions and taken a grip on the narrative (many of these “elites” have repeatedly been found to be profoundly wrong on many issues, as well as frauds, liars, and Machiavellians—and have created entire fields of erroneous, ideologically-motivated bullshit. But never mind that).

In his view, right wing-populism is not a rebellion ”against economic elites, but rather against cognitive elites. Narrowly construed, it is a rebellion against executive function.”

Hilarious. In this view, the simple populists are literally rebelling against brain function.

He goes on:

“it is a rebellion against modern society, which requires the ceaseless exercise of cognitive inhibition and control… Elites have basically rigged all of society so that, increasingly, one must deploy the cognitive skills possessed by elites to successfully navigate the social world. (Try opening a bank account, renting an apartment, or obtaining a tax refund, without engaging in analytical processing.) The left, to the extent that it favours progress, is essentially committed to intensifying the features of the modern world that impose the greatest burdens of self-inhibition on individuals.”

Does he think that opening a bank account or getting a tax refund has gotten substantially harder in the time that right-wing populism has risen, and that this is, in large part, what right-wing people are pissed about? First of all, that’s unbelievably condescending. Second, this goes against the whole narrative of progress—wasn’t progress making all our lives easier? Doesn’t the digital ID make signing in and creating accounts so easy compared to before when we needed to go somewhere, get ID, answer questions, file paperwork, etc.? Are you cognitive elites and your “progress” making life easier or not?

This is just an expansion of the racist progressive notion that voter ID laws are bad cause poor dumb black people don’t know how to get ID’s. Likewise, the notion that getting a bank account is hard for dumb conservatives and that’s partly why they have turned on “elites” is just as insulting and ignorant.

Regardless, a cursory look at many of the central claims of right-wing populists is that progressives are making too easy those exact things which Heath claims are too hard for dumb populists. Populists are actively campaigning on more restrictions and hurdles around voting, ID, renting, banking, etc. They argue that progressives are making so much of civic life so open and easy that it is prone to corruption and abuse, and thus society is being undermined.

This brings us to the absolute doozey of bad arguments in his piece though: That conservatives/right-wing populists (it’s hard to really even know who the target of his article is at this point) don’t like progressive language-policing and neo-pronouns because it hurts their brains too much. They’re literally too dumb for a change in terminology and it makes them angry and, in Heath’s view, that’s the extent of their analysis.

I’m not kidding. That’s his argument:

Seeing things in this way makes it easier to understand why people get so worked up over seemingly minor issues, like language policing. The problem with demanding political correctness in speech, and punishing or ostracizing those who fail, is that it turns every conversation into a Stroop test, allowing elites the opportunity to exhibit conspicuous self-control. It requires the typical person, while speaking, to actively suppress the familiar word that is primed (e.g. “homeless”), and to substitute through explicit cognition the recently-minted word that is now favoured (e.g. “unhoused”).

Elites are not just insensitive, but positively dismissive of the burdens that this imposes on many people. As a result, by performing the cognitive operation with such fluidity, they are not only demonstrating their superiority, they are rubbing other people’s faces in it. (From this perspective, it is not surprising that the demand for “they/them” pronouns upset some people even more, because the introduction of a plural pronoun forces a verb change, which requires an even more demanding cognitive performance.)

As with another ideological piece I recently took issue with, he provides absolutely no evidence whatsoever for his claim that catering to the language police requires a serious amount of brain power, though I suppose I can see how that’s feasible. But, worse, he asserts with absolutely no supporting evidence whatsoever that this cognitive difficulty is the fundamental issue right-wing people have with language policing, and it’s the extent of their thinking on the issue: “hurts my brain—makes me angry”.

It’s the most simplistic, self-serving take on the whole issue I have seen in a long time.

In reality, for conservatives, it’s not that the language change is “too hard” and we get pissed off at how easy it is for our superior “cognitive elites”; it’s that it is performative, artificial, forced, and harmful in a range of ways which, actually, most right-wingers could discuss more intelligently than most left-wingers (watch any interview at a left-wing protest, watch the clips of “cognitive elites” testifying and struggling to answer questions about the logic underlying such language changes—posing simple questions to “elites” and watching them stumble and stutter was one of the slam-dunk tactics of the populist right).

But this whole argument veers into the realm of leftist masturbation when he says that by performing such woke-language substitutions with ease and fluidity, cognitive elites are “demonstrating their superiority”.

He takes their “superiority” as a given—again without evidence—but he does at least think that signaling one’s superiority is “insensitive” to us dummies. How kind. In reality, this undeserved belief in their own “superiority”, and the unwillingness to engage in debates on the terms of the actual arguments, is what is partly driving the rebellion against “elites”.

As Sowell said:

The vision of the left is not just a vision of the world. For many, it is also a vision of themselves — a very flattering vision of people trying to save the planet, rescue the exploited, create “social justice” and otherwise be on the side of the angels. This is an exalting vision that few are ready to give up, or to risk on a roll of the dice, which is what submitting it to the test of factual evidence amounts to. Maybe that is why there are so many fact-free arguments on the left — and why they react so viscerally to those who challenge their vision.

And it’s very appropriate that his book The Vision of the Anointed is subtitled “Self-congratulation as the basis for social policy”.

Heath finishes his essay by presenting a list of phenomena which he claims prove his point, but which are mostly simply aesthetic critiques of populists, about tone and communication style. This despite his claim that “Elites typically focus on the content of what is said and ignore the manner in which is it is said.” Really? Is that why we’ve all been tone-policed and hounded for years about “implications”, “dog-whistles”, and “microaggressions” by the so-called “cognitive elite”?

All in all, Heath makes the tired case that right-wing populists, anti-wokes, conservatives—whatever—rely on System 1 thinking. Fast, simple, intuitive, prone to error. And that the superior cognitive elites (Richard Banania’s “elite human capital”) are more rational and analytical, not prone to jumping to conclusions or making silly errors.

Never mind that much of leftist analysis is simple, fast, fact-free, intuitive, stoner logic—analysis based on simple oikophobic heuristics.

Never mind that for years now, these elites have seen patterns where none exist (indeed, Heath himself wrote one of the best pieces on the conspiracy theories so popular among the cognitive elite); they have jumped to conclusions; seen any easily-explained disparity and mindlessly, instinctively shouted “DISCRIMINATION”; and stampeded towards hurried and insane social reforms based largely on emotion and intuition.

In fairness, I don’t think it’s only progressives who do this stuff, we’re all probably equally prone to error and motivated cognition.

But leftist academics are uniquely prone to this kind of public self-congratulation, this self-serving intellectual-ideological masturbation—and we’re tired of being made to partake in their fantasy.

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It’s worth pausing before mindlessly buying these headlines warning of “rising” extremism in NZ classrooms, and questioning the claims that young men are spiraling under some new wave of “toxic masculinity”. We need to actually look into these claims, and ask “is there any evidence of this?”.

Spoiler: There’s not.

As I have said before, you CAN NOT take any mainstream commentary on topics like this at face value.

The Press article simply represents Institutionalized Progressivism’s last ditch attempt to control the narrative (or “The Message”), which they have so carefully attempted to astroturf among the youth, by simply presenting a list of spooky keywords, to which we have been trained to responds like Pavlov’s dogs.

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The Press article tearfully wails: “Trump”, “extreme”, “trad”, “toxic masculinity”—and we’re all supposed to uncritically *GASP!* and clutch our chest. “I knew boys are the problem!”, “we have to do something about these toxic boys!”. As if modern institutions aren’t already actively hostile to boys and men.

The claims in panicked press articles are based on a report called Responding to Extremism in the Classroom: Online Lies and Real World Harm written by the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA), which is a Teacher’s Union here in New Zealand. Based on my first-hand experience with another educator’s union, I barely have to bother with the research required to confirm just how thoroughly captured and ideologically biased the PPTA is.

I managed to get my hands on the Responding to Extremism report, and it’s even dumber than I expected1.

It makes a whole host of claims, for which it provides absolutely no evidence whatsoever, about the rise on misinformation, disinformation, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, etc., among our young people, especially young men.

The only “evidence” it provides for these claims are statements like:

As educators, we are witnessing firsthand the disruptive impact of these harms on classroom dynamics, students’ ability to think critically, student mental health, and teacher workload.

No citation, no data, no actual quotes. Nothing.

Or

Anecdotally, many members have spoken about the impact of disinformation on their classrooms

That doesn’t even require a response.

Or

Anecdotally, teachers in Aotearoa too are seeing more and more young men being drawn into the toxic world of the ‘manosphere’… this is showing up in the classroom… as blatant disrespect or outright dismissal of teachers simply because of their gender. and the reality is, there’s little to no support for schools or teachers on how to respond to this kind of behaviour.

There is not a shred of data here.

Nor is there an actual explanation of specifically what sort of behaviour they are witnessing, what they take as disrespect, whether it differs from the usual kind of disrespect adolescents tend to express, nor how frequently it is occurring, nor whether they can know for sure that this “disrespect” or ”dismissal” is truly gender based (after all, like 80% of teachers are female).

The certainty with which such baseless claims are made is a great example of pious fraud:

In fairness, the report does cite literally 2 empirical pieces of evidence (wow!)—from other countries. And even that evidence likely arises from concept creep and the ever-expanding definitions of “extremism” and “hate speech” as whatever deviates from the hyper-progressive orthodoxy.

But the only actually relevant piece of data they cite, about a “rise” in extremism (again, not from NZ), uses the well-known tactic of reporting a percentage increase rather than raw numbers, as it allows you to make increases seem much larger. For example, I could report an increase from a single occurrence to 4 occurrences as a 300% increase, which sounds very scary!

There is absolutely zero justification for the conclusion that extremism is an “escalating threat” in our schoolboys. The report leans heavily on the most unserious evidence possible: a single teacher reporting that a few boys in her class called themselves “Trump boys.”

That’s it. That’s the smoking gun. Anecdotal, unverifiable, contextless information. They are really hoping the word “Trump” there is enough to convince and scare you. As if a positive inclination towards Trump, a democratically elected leader who received over 70 million votes, is ipso facto sufficient evidence of “extremism”.

All the mainstream articles conveniently fail to mention that the PPTA report contains no actual empirical data whatsoever.

As a perfect—and hilarious—example of how poor this report is, one of the points in Section 3 literally just says the words “we should all be nervous”. What the hell is this?

Mischief in the Longhouse

In all likelihood, saying that you like Trump is simply the easiest (and funniest) way for adolescents to pushback against the smothering longhouse of modern education, in which people like the PPTA chairperson, Paul Stevens, are the new Den Mothers.

It’s probably hilarious to be a young guy, bored in class, listening to your Den Mother teacher ramble on, forcing their socio-political worldview onto you instead of teaching you math, telling you that you’re an oppressor and that Trump’s a literal Nazi; and to just be like “nah, Trump’s cool” and then watch the teacher literally shake in horror and struggle to self-soothe. It’s really not that deep.

They say that male students use “dog whistles” and “hate speech”, though again they provide no examples (hate speech, as we know, is a term they love to play fast-and-loose with; the concept of “dog whistles” is just used as a way to claim that something which you can’t reasonably label hate speech, is actually secret, coded hate speech).

Apparently students are making arguments that even a few years ago “society would’ve utterly rejected”. But again (repeating this is getting tiresome) no evidence is presented and no description of what these beliefs actually are; we’re supposed to just take their word for it.

There is no actual detail, just vague scaries.

These “extreme arguments” are likely not described because they are actually relatively benign and mainstream centre-right beliefs which are indeed becoming more popular as progressives lose their grip on the culture.

But—oh no! These kids are (supposedly) also “pushing back on feminism”!

“Pushing back on feminism” is an intentionally broad category of beliefs. It’s a category that could entail anything from saying that women should be literally chained to the oven and whipped if they talk back to their husbands, to the idea that, due to inherent human differences, men are better suited (or more inclined) on average to certain roles and women to others, and that actually most people would be happier living in alignment with these general differences.

I suspect these “extreme” boys’ opinions were closer to the latter kind of “pushback” than the former. Which is why they didn’t actually specify the beliefs beyond the vague and fear-mongering statement about a “pushback against feminism”.

Just as the police recently tried to recategorize free speech as hate speech, there is no evidence presented that these young boys are expressing anything other than centre-right beliefs which have simply been recategorized as “extreme”.

A whole, largely moderate worldview has been thrown so far out of the modern Overton window that it’s return to the mainstream strikes cold fear into the tender hearts of these so-called “educators”.

The Press article goes on to say, unsupported by any data, that:

“Some female students had also embraced ‘trad-wife’ ideologies that promoted limiting women’s roles to homemaking and child-rearing” (emphasis mine)

I am highly dubious that these girls support “limiting” women to certain roles; the authors snuck that “limiting” in there to give the impression that these girls literally want government-enforced Trad-ness. Embracing and advocating for a voluntarily trad lifestyle (by modern standards anyway) because it’s more aligned with your evolved psychology, and because you think it’ll make you and your friends happier, is very different to endorsing the stripping of all women’s rights and “limiting” them to certain spheres of life.

But the PPTA and the Press authors are working very hard to conflate the two.

It’s more of the Disinformation Project style propagandizing, propped up by shitty “research” and poorly executed attempts to stigmatize and outlaw any healthy, semi-traditional beliefs (remember when they tried to say that making your own food and wearing blond hair in braids was a sign of extremism?)

Big Brother in our Schools

This whole PPTA report, and the subsequent coordinated media push, is a big nothing-burger. One blogger hilariously described the PPTA report as a “graphic” read, which is insane. It’s all simply another attempt by progressives to defenestrate from the Overton window even moderately “conservative” beliefs, and to push many of our young people (especially our young men) out that window, too.

Of course, the PPTA report calls for the government to step in, for “urgent action”, which will just be more of the same: treating our boys (and anyone who doesn’t buy into hyper-progressivism) as guilty of “extremism” until proven innocent.

They want a Big Brother bureaucrat to be installed in every school, by calling for a:

dedicated Digital Citizenship and Wellbeing Lead in every secondary school, responsible for staff training, curriculum integration and student support, who can work alongside classroom teachers and pastoral teams.

In practice this will simply further embed a smothering, progressive managerial orthodoxy in our schools. One that stifles critical thinking, actively suppresses viewpoint diversity, is actively hostile to even moderate non-progressive viewpoints, and one that scapegoats our boys and labels masculinity toxic.

And so we’ll continue to lose more and more of our boys, as they drop out (or more accurately, are pushed out) of school, society, and institutions.

And they will call this “equality”:

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Just as I was receiving peer-review feedback on a manuscript I submitted to a psychology journal, demanding that I add “more theorizing” to the manuscript, published his essay Hasty Theories and put words to the skepticism I had been feeling lately about the “theory crisis” in psychology.

Inzlicht asks whether, in actuality, psychology has too strongly internalized the idea that theory will fix everything, and we now hastily and carelessly shoehorn theory into everything. This is perfectly exemplified in my peer-reviewers’ call for greater theorizing in my manuscript.

My study was the first in my little research niche to use the methods and analysis combination that I used. I used a sample size that, while large enough and justified by my power analysis, should probably be replicated in a larger sample. My study mostly found null results, which you can’t really meaningfully theorize about (absence of evidence not being evidence of absence). And so on. There are many reasons why theorizing shouldn’t be the primary goal of my study. In fact, I should be actively discouraged from theorizing (essentially speculating) too much based on my study.

As Inzlicht says:

Our top journals actively encourage this theoretical gold rush, demanding that every paper advance or propose a new theory. Try submitting a careful descriptive study and watch reviewers ask: "But what theory does this advance?" As if documenting something interesting about human behaviour isn't valuable unless it moves some theoretical ball forward.

I don’t mean to imply that theory is unimportant. But when your celebrated theoretical work turns out to be an elaborate castle built on data that was tortured into compliance, you get humble real fast. Perhaps rushing to theorize—before understanding what you’re explaining—just to get published in top journals is not ideal.

He describes how theorizing too early and too often just results in confirmation bias, especially when the theory advances ideas and worldviews which we find “socially compelling” or desirable:

We all fall prey to confirmation bias, even those of us who study it for a living. Researchers become so invested in their theoretical hunches that they'll keep tweaking experiments, massaging methods, and reframing results until they get what they expect, essentially bending their methods to confirm their pet hypotheses…

And if the theory is appealing—because it is intuitive or elegant or socially compelling—it can be seductive, discouraging dissent and surviving on its rhetorical appeal or supposed importance even as the evidence starts to look threadbare.

This rush to theorize, combined with the ideological homogeneity of social science, has meant that very often theories are simply hastily constructed narratives used to support the worldviews dominant among social scientists. This was seen in the theory of stereotype treat:

Imagine an alternative timeline where these effects were discovered without the grand theorizing. "Huh, some women seem to perform slightly worse on math tests under certain conditions when we remind them of negative stereotypes. Weird. Wonder if anyone else can find this?" If we'd approached it as a curiosity rather than a revolution in understanding inequality, maybe we would have noticed how fragile the initial evidence was. Maybe we would have demanded better replications before theorizing and building entire interventions around it.

But no.

We canonized these theories before we rigorously tested them. And, once canonized, theories stop serving truth and start serving the reputations of their creators.

Inzlicht correctly notes that building theories on questionable research is doomed to fail. Methods, measurement, validity, and accurate description must come first— psychology is prematurely trying to fix and generate theories before we have the foundation upon which theories must be built.

What would psychology look like if we took description seriously? For one, we'd be more patient before proposing new theories. Instead of racing to explain every interesting finding, we'd spend time mapping the phenomena first. When does an effect occur? How robust is it? What are its boundary conditions? These aren't trivial questions.

Kurt Lewin famously said, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory." But we've rushed to theorize, resulting in theories that are flimsy, trite, or false.

I propose canonizing another, less pithy line, this time from Solomon Ash (via Rozin): “Before we inquire into origins and functional relations, it is necessary to know the thing we are trying to explain.” In other words, description must precede explanation.

Below I will outline two major obstacles to theory generation in social psychology specifically that I don’t often see discussed.

The Underdetermination of Theory

The underdetermination of theory by evidence is a problem outlined by philosophers of science who point out that, very often, the available evidence is insufficient to definitively determine which of many competing theories is the correct one.

Very often, competing theories (and a whole host of yet un-proposed theories) could all explain some set of observations equally well. Additionally, even testing theories and subjecting them to falsification is often not conducive to deciding between theories, because when a prediction or hypothesis not supported, it is unclear whether the central hypothesis was false, such that it was responsible for the falsification, or whether any number of auxiliary assumption was falsified (say assumptions around manipulation effectiveness, measurement validity, etc.) and this caused the negative result. Unambiguous falsifications are very often almost impossible.

This is all true of science in general, but is even more of a problem for social sciences, in which the phenomena under study are far from being mechanistic and reliable, and our studies are built on a huge patchwork of quite dubious assumptions.

Human emotion and behavior is complex, contextual, and subject to multifactorial causation. Additionally, in psychology, our measures are usually indirect measures of unobservable “latent constructs”. We are unable to directly measure these constructs, so we have participants self-report their own “measurement” of the constructs through presumably accurate self-perception. These constructs are often fuzzy, ill-defined, overlapping, and tainted by hidden normative judgements (almost always of a left-wing bent). Experimental manipulations on such latent constructs are often “fat handed” and highly ambiguous.

Results from these studies very often show weak relationships or small effect sizes, such that using these results to make any sort of conclusive claim about some causal mechanism or theory explaining the phenomena is not valid. Very often the most we could say is something like, “this very ambiguous, fat handed intervention slightly increases the chances that some people might slightly increase how much they say they feel X, at least according to our fuzzy definition of X, which we measured using this hastily created scale (but α = > .8, so we’re good!)”. Likewise, supposed falsifications of a theory are equally ambiguous, even using so-called “severe tests”.

The underdetermination of theory by evidence shows that one could create almost any theory to explain some set of data, with limited useful ability to choose between different competing explanations. Thus, theory generation, as noted by Inzlicht, becomes a competition between researchers to create the most interesting, socially desirable, or otherwise appealing explanation—amounting to, essentially, a popularity contest.

Now, I love social science; it’s fun and interesting. All of the ambiguity gives plenty of opportunity for exploration and discussion. And despite the reasons for skepticism I think it is possible, but very difficult, to advance psychological knowledge.

However, when there is an artificial and hasty drive for theory construction under such conditions of underdetermination, and a popularity contest for theory selection, one aspect of the social science field really comes into play:

Ideological Homogeneity

The ideological homogeneity of social scientists actually bookends the problem discussed above, around underdetermination.

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As I have written elsewhere social scientists, like all humans, are often tribal epistemologists. As Clark and Winegard note: people (including scientists) “do not, on average, treat ideologically congruent and incongruent information similarly; rather, they engage in ideological epistemology such that they treat congruent information more favorably and charitably”.

Very often ideological biases get built in to instruments measuring constructs in psychology (see “Scale Creation, Use and Misuse: How Politics Undermines Measurement, In: The Politics of Social Psychology.”). These biases also manifest in the design of studies, the interpretation of results, the appraisal of competing explanations, and the generation of theories. Then, in an ideologically homogeneous field, this flawed and ideologically driven research doesn’t get pulled up in peer review. What results is a body of extremely flawed, incomplete, ideologically biased research, all of which only makes the aforementioned underdetermination and ambiguity worse!

In this environment, once the ‘theory popularity contest’ starts, what you have is a bunch of scientists (humans: tribal epistemologists) who share the same biases, priors, and ideology, apprising ideologically tainted research which does not contain enough unambiguous evidence to actually allow even an unbiased body of researchers to be able to discriminate between theoretical explanations.

What you get are endless theories about “stereotype threat” or “minority stress” or “system justification”, all of which serve primarily to massage and support the worldview of progressives rather than to validly explain some phenomenon. You get interventions which don’t work, and results which don’t replicate. Or you get theories which purport to explain social or cultural phenomena, which look like this:

And then once these theories proliferate, once social scientists buy-in to a theory (again, usually because it affirms their progressive worldview), it’s all they can see, and they often—consciously and unconsciously by their own ignorance (as many social scientists are not scientists at all)—engage in motivated research with questionable research practices and ignored alternative explanations in order to erroneously reify that theory and advance their progressive worldview rather than advance knowledge.

Trying to improve rigor in this kind of environment won’t work

Inzlicht ends his essay calling for a patient approach to theory generation. We need to first improve the descriptive rigor and measurement underlying our studies before we can even come close to generating accurate theories:

What would psychology look like if we took description seriously? For one, we'd be more patient before proposing new theories. Instead of racing to explain every interesting finding, we'd spend time mapping the phenomena first. When does an effect occur? How robust is it? What are its boundary conditions? These aren't trivial questions.

Kurt Lewin famously said, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory." But we've rushed to theorize, resulting in theories that are flimsy, trite, or false.

I propose canonizing another, less pithy line, this time from Solomon Ash (via Rozin): “Before we inquire into origins and functional relations, it is necessary to know the thing we are trying to explain.” In other words, description must precede explanation.

The path forward isn't to choose between rigor and theory; it's to use rigor and precision in service of better theory. Sometimes the most productive thing we can do is slow down, to ensure that we are observing carefully and describing what we actually see. Better theories through patience, not speed.

Look, Kruglanski's not wrong that we need good theories. But rushing to build them before we understand what we're explaining? That's how we got into this mess in the first place. Let's slow down and do this thing right this time.

I would argue, as do others, that slowing down and “doing things right this time” should be the goal, more than compulsive theorizing. Strong descriptive work is more important.

And doing things right this time is only possible if we improve viewpoint diversity in the social sciences.

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It has been one year since I started writing on substack with this, my first piece, inspired by Lasch’s Revolt of the Elites.

I decided to touch-up and repost the piece here, as a one year anniversary post. Though it is unpolished in some ways, it’s always worth reposting any piece with lots of Lasch quotes.

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In his book, The Revolt of the Elites, Cristopher Lasch laments the invasion of free-market principles into the realm of personal and civic virtue.

Many readers will know and understand the economic theory of the invisible hand, a concept arising from liberal economics, which argues against the artificial regulation of markets and economies. It is posited, by the proponents of such free-market economics, that a population of unregulated, self-interested agents will produce in the aggregate—as an emergent phenomenon­—more wealth and public goods than would a population of economic agents whose self-interest and behaviour is constrained by regulation

The grumbling Hive

One of the simplest and earliest examples of this perspective is found in a poem called “The Grumbling Hive” from The Fable of the Bees, by Bernard Mandeville. The poem describes a thriving hive of bees who were free to exert their economic self-interest and were living in great excess and wealth. Some bees, despite their overall thriving, success, and wealth, begin to ‘grumble’ of the lack of virtue among their members, and so the hive commits to a diffuse and widespread altruism:

“At last in Anger swore, he'd rid

The bawling Hive of Fraud, and did.

The very Moment it departs,

And Honesty fills all their Hearts.”

The bees cease to exhibit any self-interest (Mandeville says they are “Blest with content and honesty”) and show little appetite for excess and luxury. However, this results in a collapse in productivity, and the hive languishes, because:

“Bare Virtue can't make Nations live

In Splendor; they, that would revive

A Golden Age, must be as free,

For Acorns, as for Honesty.”

The argument underlying the Invisible Hand and the Fable of the Bees is that certain desires and behaviours, when exhibited by individuals at large, can produce outcomes which seem contrary to the traits displayed by those individuals (the subtitle is Private Vices, Public Benefits). Simply, it is asserted that widespread economic self-interest produces an environment which naturally maximizes the wellbeing of all, more so than in the attempt to constrain and regulate behaviour to produce such outcomes in an artificial manner. This reflects a belief that responsibility for virtue can be outsourced from individuals to “market forces”, “structures”, and “incentives”.

This may well be true in the economic sphere—when it comes to things like corporate competition, investment, price setting, and resource allocation. However, as Lasch points out in The Revolt of the Elites, even

“early admirers of the market—Adam Smith, for example—did not advocate or even envision conditions in which every phase of life would be organized according to the principles of the market.”

The sociocultural free-market

Regardless, these free-market principles have migrated out of the economic realm and into the social and civic realm. This is reflected in the liberal-postmodern dissolution of all but a few of our societal regulations, social expectations, and standards of personal conduct.

In contrast to the effects of free-market philosophies as manifested in economics (whereby these assumptions result in less state regulation), the erosion of organic norms and regulations around social and civic behaviour has meant that the responsibility for the healthy functioning of society and democracy has been outsourced from responsible individuals embedded in guiding systems of cultural norms and social expectations, to “structures”, “systems”, and finally, to the institutions of the State.

That is to say, the left’s free-market of morality relies on the logic of the invisible hand, but, as Lasch repeatedly shows, it doesn’t work, and thus the state has to step in to a now degraded social milieu—and that invisible hand turns into a boot.

And as government boots tend to do, it treads on all the wrong things.

In Revolt of the Elites, Lasch argues (among a wide array of other things) that “democracy implies high standards of personal conduct”, and that this relies on a considerable network of organic social or cultural regulations—a fact which has been so quickly forgotten by today’s progressive left-wing especially. Progressives, being captured by an obsession with identity-politics, tolerance, and a hyper-sensitivity to perceived hardships, have asserted that traditional social regulations and standards (such as expectations around the family, personal virtue, competence, self-reliance, strength of character, education, etc.) are oppressive and unfair.

Thus, standards of conduct which were once demanded of citizens are now considered oppressive, racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist products of whiteness and patriarchy. In their utopian obsession with alleviating psychological distress and discomfort—especially for those who they consider “marginalized” by the old societal ideals—Lasch says that progressives have made “the deflation of ideals the prescription for mental health” and caused the “wholesale defection from the standards of personal conduct—civility, industry, self-restraint—that were once considered indispensable to democracy”.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the deflation of these ideals has caused the deflation of an organic and authentic community-mindedness. After all, it is for the good of the community that people are expected to abide by certain standards, to be productive and constructive to civic society. As Lasch states “group life itself presupposes the trust that can prevail only when individuals are held accountable for their actions”. For the good of the community, it must be expected that individuals strive to reach certain levels of self-reliance, competence, virtue, selflessness, and responsibility.

Liberal-postmodern citizens, however, without the appropriate social pressure, have become frail, sensitive, self-centered, histrionic, and obsessed with identity and emotion. Unsurprisingly, a populace composed of such people cannot not produce a strong, communal, virtuous society—regardless of whether a similar, counterintuitive logic holds in the realm of markets. But as Lasch notes, many have “taken the position that democracy can dispense with civic virtue” and assume that “institutions, as opposed to character, [can] provide all the virtue democracy needs.” This is the idea of a new invisible hand of morality.

It’s important to point out here that things like “stigma” which get deconstructed in leftism, are actually meant to function as a kind of social technology, or “social scaffolding”, which supports and strengthens individuals’ fallible self-control, acting as a guard rail that helps incentivize people to resist pathological, self- and community-harming behaviors:

stigmatization by others may be an important instrument of individual self-control, and should therefore be conceived of as a type of “social scaffolding,” that may in the long run promote individual autonomy. The result is a defence of stigmatization, in a set of cases that have recently attracted controversy, such as drug addiction, petty criminality, child abandonment, voluntary unemployment, and dropping out of school. The central problem with destigmatization, in these cases, is that it shifts a greater part of the burden of self-control onto individuals, and onto the exercise of individual willpower, to resist the temptations that give rise to these patterns of behavior.

[Destigmatization] therefore represents an abdication, on the part of society, of one of the traditional functions that social institutions discharge in the behavioral economy of individuals.

What happens when you remove social scaffolding and warp the incentive structures of society? You get a whole host of counterproductive behaviours, pathology, and learned helplessness:

Even birds learn and respond to incentives like this:

Under these moral-free-market conditions, what results is a culture of absolute licentiousness in which nothing is forbidden—other than forbiddance itself. As Lasch says, the Left often “fall back on the claim that democratic men and women make up in tolerance what they lack in the way of character”, not realizing that an over-abundance of tolerance and compassion is what undermines civic virtue and therefore democracy itself. He points out that “the ideology of compassion, however agreeable to our ears, is one of the principal influences, in its own right, on the subversion of civic life, which depends not so much on compassion as on mutual respect”.

In Western democracies captured by this progressive doctrine, we are now loathe to make demands on each other—aside from the demand of a banal, degrading “tolerance”. We no longer expect people to behave a certain way or achieve a certain level of virtue, responsibility, self-reliance, or competence. Instead, we only make demands of the government and its institutions which are expected to provide all the virtue democracy needs, and which now invade and administer and mother-over every aspect of our personal and social lives. The result is the creation of a bloated, bureaucratic, therapeutic model of the state and its institutions, because, as Lasch notes, “the atrophy of informal controls leads irresistibly to the expansion of bureaucratic controls”, as I said earlier—that invisible hand must inevitably become a boot.

But, given that our highest ideals have become a free-market of tolerance, compassion, and victim-worship, these therapeutic state institutions can do nothing except “reduce everything exalted to its lowest common denominator”. They merely enforce ‘tolerance’ and, paradoxically, attempt to engender a culture of mutual respect by dissolving all other social regulations in the hopes that somehow this will produce a society of healthy, community-minded individuals. Instead, what we get is a culture in decline­—a culture of narcissism.

To summarize…

Left-wing progressives—despite their aversion to free market economics—advance a strangely free market morality in which no one should have any social regulations or expectations placed upon them (other than expectation of indiscriminate tolerance, which is really just an enforced lack of the kind of social regulations I am talking about). Obsessed with all ‘minorities’, they deconstruct norms, expectations, and cultural meanings by which the vast majority of the population are well-served.

This, despite their claims, is the opposite of community-mindedness and civic virtue. Progressives think they abide by standards of virtue, but their standard is only that no particularly useful standards be placed on any individuals, while a huge weight of expectations are placed on the State. What results, as stated above, is a largely lazy, emotional, histrionic, or otherwise deviant populace which is increasingly subject to the power of a bloated bureaucratic state which is required to support and manage the personal lives and livelihoods of the citizenry.

What about the right?

Much of the Right-wing, in their parallel modern over-commitment to a rugged individualism, also tolerate very few regulations or constraints on their behaviour, but at least they maintain a shred of old, pragmatic ideals of self-reliance, strength, competence, traditional virtue, chivalry, or even at the very least just maintaining one’s physical fitness. The right-wing worldview is, in general, certainly more friendly to the idea of submitting oneself to exacting standards of personal and civic virtue, beyond mere ideals of tolerance and self-obsession. Despite the common criticisms levied against the right, in many ways their worldview is more amenable to the idea of effective personal service to the community.

The way forward

The expectation that we meet responsibilities conducive to democracy requires a commitment to education, virtue, competence, self-reliance, community-mindedness, and other apparently outdated qualities. None of which will develop in a progressive free market of morality, none of which our government institutions are interested in or capable of encouraging (many of these virtues would actually undermine the bloated role of the government), and none of which state-education systems appear to be concerned with teaching children.

So, it might be time to ask, as Lasch does:

“When government is relied on to furnish rules of moral obligation, will it weaken the very social ties that make government possible in the first place?”

With all of the concern touted about the functioning of our democracies, it would be useful to look to Lasch’s philosophy of communitarianism and mild social-conservatism. As he says in Revolt of the Elites, democracy “requires a more invigorating ethic than tolerance. Tolerance is a fine thing, but it is only the beginning of democracy, not its destination… We have become too proficient in making excuses for ourselves… We are so busy defending our rights… that we give little thought to our responsibilities.” We need a third way, between the excesses of the left and right, which relocates the moral obligation to the community and to each other, placing it back on community-minded individuals—on citizens, in the traditional sense.

It’s time we remembered that old-school qualities like civic virtue, self-reliance, community-mindedness, productiveness, and strength of character rarely develop in a licentious free market of morality. They are furnished only by traditional social-regulations and expectations.

As Lasch points out in The Revolt of the Elites, it is these diminishing qualities which are the preconditions for the trust and solidarity on which Democracy relies.

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The Schizoid Delusions of Transhumanists

Just as many in my X feed were blowing up over the interview between Thiel and Douthat, in which Thiel apparently can’t decide whether he wants humanity to survive and appears to want to radically transform humanity—body, heart, and soul—by merging us with his dystopian technology, I was caught up in my own short interaction of a similar kind.

The person I was talking to (on X) was Hunter Ash, a somewhat controversial detransitioner who now leans heavily into hereditarianism, transhumanism, and tech futurism. He is, essentially, a right wing progressive and thus equally as delusional and radical (maybe more so?) as any other kind of progressive.

Bear with me as I walk through our brief conversation, I promise you, it’s “interesting”.

To start us off, he tweeted that he completely agrees with Thiel:

“Of course we want to improve ourselves. Of course we want to achieve mastery over our flesh. Of course we want to advance so far that one day we might not be recognizable as human.

It was that last bit that caught my eye. Why must we so surely want to “no longer be recognizable as human”?

I asked, as politely as possible, whether the same psychological dysfunction that once drove him to want to change sex and no longer be recognizable as his own natural human sex might be the same dysfunction driving his desire to transform and mutate humanity in general:

Because Ash is a good dude, open to debate, he took the question well, but in my view, basically affirmed my point:

That’s a fair question, but I don’t think this belief of mine relates to that specifically. I think I have strong reasons for supporting transhumanism that I can defend, but if we want to psychologize it I think “having an alien psychology” and “not wanting to feel trapped” are better candidates. I don’t like or relate most people, and I want to be free of their constraints

He admits that yes, he experiences some sort of psychological distress in relation to his own and everyone else’s humanity. He feels “alien” and “trapped” and that he wants to free us from the “constraints” of our humanity.

In response, I pointed out to him that:

“In the same way that progressives want to “free us from the constraints” of biological sex—or stigma, or standards of conduct that maintain society—in order to benefit a small minority of dysfunctional people at the expense of the majority who benefit from those constraints, I think trans-humanists like yourself do the same thing.

Your desire to free yourself of natural human constraints that you personally find aversive (and again, I still maintain that the desire appears to be essentially the same as your desire to change sex), will only serve the small number of others like yourself, but will radically harm and undermine most healthy and functional humans.”

I assert here that he is doing exactly what the trans activists do, in attempting to deconstruct norms and concepts and constraints by which billions of people are well-served, in order to ease his own and his kind’s (who are like 0.1% of the population) pathological discomfort with their own humanity. I argued that this is exactly what progressivism does in my review of Mary Harington’s book:

In response to my tweet, he takes a somewhat fantastical turn, saying that his transhumanist desire is not rooted in his own discomfort with his humanity/biology, and he asks me whether I think that “the future of intelligence in the universe is bipedal apes?”

I tried one more time to point out the connection between his transhumanism and his transsexualism:

To me it seems like you’ve simply shifted the discomfort with (and desire to change) your human body, to a discomfort with (and desire to change) all of humanity, based on your sense of being “alien” and “trapped”. The same psychology underlies it, you just shifted it slightly.

And I follow up by saying that yes, the future of intelligence is still likely us “apes”:

Yes, I think the transhumanist agenda won’t change that. All that will change is that intelligence in the universe will be a bunch of tech/AI-augmented bipedal ape technocrats who rule over a bunch of tech-augmented bipedal ape serfs whose bargaining power and independence has been undermined by technology, and who have been entirely alienated from their own humanity, living in artificial environments and engaging with technology that doesn’t suit their psychology. We see it happening now.

Again, this echoes what argued in her book, and what I wrote about it in my review:

This same argument can be made against not only social progressivism, but technological progressivism.

At this point Ash completes his turn into the fantastical and begins to sound like a schizophrenic patient, or a science fiction fan who took 4 grams of shrooms two hours ago:

He asserts with absolute certainty that it is our ‘destiny” to colonize the stars and transform the universe (whatever that means).

Unbelievably, he then says that if we don’t, an alien empire will do it first, and an army of von Neumann probes will wipe us out.

I respond by asking how he knows that it’s our destiny to do this universe stuff. Based on what?

It seems much more reasonable to focus on the flourishing of humans, in our natural environment for which we physically and psychologically adapted (or for which we were designed—there’s not much difference in consequence). The tech augmented world does not appear to bring human flourishing, aside from the few truly consequential medical advancements.

I asked, incredulously, if he genuinely believes he exists in a race against time with some alien empire and their self-replicating probes, to colonize the stars.

In response, he only gets more delirious, pivoting to a concern about the sun’s (and thus Earth’s) inevitable destruction:

I respond, again, incredulously:

When the sun explodes in like 50 million years or something? What a weird thing to prioritize and base your worldview on, as opposed to a more realistic focus on the wellbeing of the next immediate generations of humans. We don’t need to rush some accelerationist program to address a threat so far off. What a weird way to think!

By the way, I looked it up, the sun won’t meaningfully explode for literally billions of years.

These people’s whole political/ideological project is based on prioritizing threats literally billions of years in the future, at the expense of real flesh and blood humans, and the next few generations.

It’s the thinking of a schizophrenic—preoccupied with some existential science fiction threat, worry about self replicating probes and the sun’s death. What are we doing here? They’ve spent too much time watching sci-fi and marvel movies.

He then simply replies:

Sorry for having vision

To which I reply:

That’s not vision, that’s fantasy. That’s millions of years away. That’s borderline schizo level of thinking, to base your present choices on so abstract a threat.

Sci-fi cults

If, as says, rationalists have “spreadsheet brain”, then these tech accelerationists have sci-fi brain. They sound like apocalyptic cultists, or scientologists, who believe the end of the world is imminent and that in order to defeat the aliens we must all renounce our humanity and merge with machines and escape with Xenu into the stars.

But it’s all rooted in their own psychopathology. They’re people with a suite of pathologies, who can’t relate to themselves or to other humans in a normal way. And they’re the ones leading us down this path towards a dehumanized world of technology and pathology. All the evidence points to technology (again, apart from a few medical breakthroughs) largely just making us sadder, lonelier, crazier, dumber, more disembodied and alienated.

I think Ash perfectly embodies the overlap between the left and right wing progressives, their shared core. He was once trans; now he’s a transhumanist. His underlying thinking and psychopathology has not meaningfully changed. All progressives have a shared core ideology.

Edit: Just thought I’d add here, as another example of the pathology of these “progressive” people. Deep Left Analysis’ misanthropic take on the potential death of humanity:

Earth and Humanity

I for one think that our development of technology should be measured, should be conscious, should be patient, should only be pursued where it will actually serve humanity and our wellbeing, not based on the fantasies of the minority of mentally unwell people and the billionaires. No amount of technological augmentation will fix what ails them.

Colonizing the starts and divesting ourselves of our humanity won’t lead to human flourishing. Humans evolved (or were designed, if you wish) to live in certain kinds of environments, with embodied connections and symbiotic relationships with those environments, with certain people around us to which we also have close ties, completing tasks which have direct feedback on our evolved biology and neurology.

We were never meant to colonize the stars. We are meant to simply sit on a hillside or river bank, with loved ones around us. To look up and marvel at them from down here, at home.

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This is the final short piece in my little war with effective “altruists” and utilitarians who have come to hate nature, and wish for it’s destruction—but only out of compassion, you see.

These are people who see nature only from a distance, through their tv or computer, crying like my girlfriend does when she sees a cute gazelle get eaten by a lion in a nature documentary.

Their weakness and hyper-sensitivity drives them to a whole host of pathological, essentially psychopathic beliefs about what we should do to nature to prevent animal suffering. Like a misspecified AI which, once instructed to help end suffering, concludes that it should pave over nature, turning it into a giant cement parking lot, all to prevent animals from ever being born and thus preventing suffering.

Yes, these people actually support that idea. Read my other pieces for an overview:

First,

then,

"Total suffering" is not real (against utilitarians part 3)

The point of this final short essay is to point out that the whole utilitarian calculus is based on a fallacy.

Dust Specks and Torture

Perhaps the most illustrative example of how twisted up the utilitarians can get in their moral calculus is the “torture vs dust specks” debacle, in which a LessWrong forum of hundreds of incredibly intelligent people got all tied in knots (for literally years) trying to decide whether it was worse for one person to be horrifically tortured for 50 years without rest, or for some unfathomably large number of multiple billions of people to get a mildly annoying dust speck in their eye.

Would you prefer that one person be horribly tortured for fifty years without hope or rest, or that 3^^^3 people get dust specks in their eyes?

I think the answer is obvious. How about you?

They literally couldn’t decide which they would choose (well, actually, many did choose—and they chose the torture)… because something something, “total suffering”.

Many of them argued—following strict utilitarian reasoning—that a vast number of minor harms eventually outweighs a single severe harm, and that the sheer unbalanced numbers and total suffering would drive them to condemn that poor soul to fifty years of torture to prevent all those poor people from the dust speck—thereby minimizing some abstract concept of total suffering.

Such fallacies

But the whole project of calculating and comparing total utility by trying to aggregate harms across people is completely fallacious.

Basically: suffering is not and cannot be experienced cumulatively. This is because of the non-aggregative nature of individual experience.

Suffering Is Subjective, Individual

Suffering is an irreducibly individual experience. No person feels someone else’s suffering. Each individual feels only their own experience in full, but does not and cannot experience anyone else's.

Even if a billion people all feel a dust speck in the eye, this merely results in a billion tiny, isolated instances of trivial discomfort, and none of it is compounded or intensified by the fact that others are also suffering. It is not metaphysically or phenomenologically valid to say this adds up to some instance of grave suffering.

There Is No Subjective “Total Pain”

There is no entity that experiences “the total sum” of pain across individuals. Without a collective consciousness, there's no meaningful sense in which “3^^^3 dust specks” are experienced as a total pain.

The only morally relevant unit of suffering is the individual.

Thus, no matter how many trivial harms occur, there is no subject to experience the supposed aggregated harm of them. Suffering only matters to the degree that is actually experienced by something. And suffering is only experienced by individuals.

No one out there experiences some cumulative total suffering. It is not a level of suffering ever actually experienced by anyone. It does not exist.

Moral Value Is Tied to the Intensity and Type of Suffering

Ethically, we respond not just to the quantity of suffering but its quality—its depth and duration, and its cause. In the LessWrong crowd’s example of the dust specks and torture, they even admit that the dust is only an inadvertent mild annoyance for each person, that it barely registers in consciousness. Whereas, the fifty years of torture is an intentional decision to victimize, one that destroys the person’s identity, warps perception, and consumes the person's life entirely.

This introduces an asymmetry: the moral salience of torture is not just greater in degree but categorically different. The dust specks shouldn’t even register as morally urgent, they're just background noise in the moral calculus.

We shouldn’t regard 1,000,000 paper cuts as morally equivalent to one person having their hands cut off. Even though one could tally "more pain events” or more total suffering, we intuitively know they aren't in the same moral universe.

Aggregating Harms Risks Absurdity

If we allow arbitrarily large numbers of tiny harms to "add up" to a great harm, we risk getting dragged into paradoxes, moral absurdity, and unbelievably repugnant conclusions.

Living in this abstract moral universe of thought experiments about some hypothetically flawless ability to count, quantify, and aggregate harms, distributed across absurd numbers, leads us to radically overweight the small hypothetical harms of many individuals (like the suffering of billions of insects) and treat them as more important than great, real harms experienced by actual individuals.

This leads to untenable decisions, like accepting active torture or murder as morally preferable to some enormous number of people experiencing some inadvertent annoyance. Or that people should neglect other charities and give their money to support ludicrous attempts to prevent insect suffering.

Justice and Dignity Demand Non-Aggregation

Moral decisions must respect the integrity of individuals, not treat them as fungible units in an equation, sacrificing them to minimize a hypothetical, non-existent sum value. Aggregative reasoning treats people as vessels for utility or disutility, rather than as ends in themselves.

By refusing to equate mass trivial harms with individual catastrophic ones, we uphold the principle that individuals have value, and that some harms are sacredly bad and cannot be justified, regardless of the “math”.

So…

Only individuals feel pain. Suffering does not sum across persons because there is no shared ledger of pain, only a world of individual minds each experiencing their own—and only their own—pain or pleasure.

“Total suffering” is not real, and is not experienced by anyone.

No amount of mild discomforts, multiplied by billions, should ever outweigh the real, great suffering of individuals.

To claim otherwise is to mistake numerical abstraction for moral reality, and to ignore the value of the individual and ignore that suffering differs in quality and quantity.

Hypothetical Navel Gazing

The publication Brackish Waters, Barren Soil recently posted an essay titled “Why I’m not a rationalist”.

He echoed my assertion that it’s no coincidence that utilitarians are almost always nerdy types whose desire to end suffering and pave over nature likely arises at least partly out of their own weakness and neuroticism, and lack of experience with human life, nature, and suffering. They spend all their time interacting with life through screens, spreadsheets, and thought experiments. He says they are disembodied:

Now I don’t want to be mean (well, not in this post at least) — but as I continued to interact with the rationalist community, I found that many of them have a worldview that is quite, shall we say, disembodied.

I’ve noticed that certain domains of life that are entirely missing — things like exercise, sports, and to a lesser extent, traditional dating and relationships.

The common thing about these domains is that you can’t really build a sophisticated model of how they work. You can read all the dating and fitness books, and go to seminars, and learn all of the theory — but it’s another thing entirely to apply that knowledge.

And it shows; when you look at some of the prominent rationalists, there’s a commonality in, ah, how they present themselves.

He points out that utilitarian philosophers have “spreadsheet brain”, and end up down abstract rabbit holes of hypothetical navel gazing, and then use these weird thought experiments as if they have any bearing whatsoever on reality.

many of them have “spreadsheet brain” on steroids; the idea that anything can be solved if we simply do the proper feature extraction, data cleansing, and gradient boosting. It’s the idea that, with enough python frameworks, tensor operations, and first principles thinking, you can find the optimal solution for everything — right from the comfort of your own desk.

…

First there were the asinine attempts at trying to quantify certain values and properties of conscious existence; for example, attempting to figure out how many bugs are worth a human life, or how many shrimps saved is worth a bed net in Africa. Ultimately the exercises were trolley problems on crack, and there are so many different implicit assumptions that the actual implementation became unworkable.

…

Many hypotheticals are like this: trolley problems, drowning children, repugnant conclusions, etc. After a certain point, a lot of the pontifications become so far removed from any practical considerations that any lessons learned become meaningless for the real world.

One day we may flee before the compassionate utilitarians

I have said it before—it’s bad news for us that these utilitarian types run silicon valley and the AI startups and advanced biotech, because, should they hold the reins of some future super-technology, they might end up making some absolutely crazy tradeoffs with all of our lives based on their shoddy abstract moral calculations. Only out of compassion, of course, and to minimize “total suffering”—a suffering that no one even experiences.

C.S. Lewis said it better

Unfortunately, just like everything else I write, this has all been a waste of time, because some more intelligent and more articulate person has beaten me to all of these arguments:

We must never make the problem of pain worse than it is by vague talk about the “unimaginable sum of human misery”. Suppose that I have a toothache of intensity x: and suppose that you, who are seated beside me, also begin to have a toothache of intensity x. You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x: search all time and all space and you will not find that composite pain in anyone’s consciousness. There is no such thing as a sum of suffering, for no one suffers it. When we have reached the maximum that a single person can suffer, we have, no doubt, reached something very horrible, but we have reached all the suffering there ever can be in the universe. The addition of a million fellow-sufferers adds no more pain.

—C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (pp. 203)

Okay, that’s it. I am done with them now. I’ll get back to essays on social science, viewpoint diversity, or something.

Or maybe I’ll write about religion… I am currently having something of a crisis of faith in materialism and scientism.

Until then:

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This is a brief follow up to my last essay:

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Here I come, again, to rant about anti-nature activists who call themselves “altruists”:

As an outdoorsman and hunter who spends an inordinate amount of time out in nature, actually living in it—watching the animals, eating the animals, drinking from the same streams as the animals, sleeping under the same stars, sleeping on the same earth, and battling the same elements—it’s always strange to see urban and too-online utilitarian philosophers pontificating on the nature of nature.

Bentham’s Bulldog is one of those. He was recently “dunked” on (his words) by another blogger, based on his looks and his apparent physical frailty. While I do think such aesthetic critiques are somewhat silly, there is a point to be made here.

It is not clear to me that assertions about nature from people like Bentham’s Bulldog—that life in nature is “hellish” and that there is a perpetual unheard chorus of animals and insects screaming in pain—is not at least partly based on his apparent lack of experiences of true immersion in nature, and his likely physical inability to have such experiences. Again, I am, perhaps unfairly inferring this simply from his physique. But stereotypes have some basis in reality.

So let me tell these urban city folk about nature.

Life is good

For most animals, most of the time, I would suggest that life is not hell—life is good (or worst-case hedonically neutral), even for the short-lived insects that Bentham’s Bulldog seems so concerned about.

I have spent many weeks in the wild, watching prey animals of various species, who don’t know that they are being watched. They do indeed display a reasonable vigilance, aware that they might be preyed upon at any time, but a simple observation of their body language and behavior does not suggest that these wild animals are in a constant state of PTSD—an absurd claim. They do indeed sometimes get hurt, in a fight, by falling, by getting ill.

But more often than not—like 99% of the time—all I see are deer, goats, chamois, sheep, etc., sitting on sunward facing slopes, squinting into the sun in a state of half sleep, periodically getting up to nibble on some supplejack or broadleaf. They may occasionally look around suddenly, hyper-alert, before resuming their feeding and snoozing. I frequently see ungulates—young and old—running around, kicking their feet, play-fighting, and so on, apparently without a care in the world.

I have also seen deer run 100 yards after one of their neighbors has been shot by a hunter, only to look back confused for a few minutes, before continuing to feed and wander aimlessly over the next ridgeline, with absolutely no sign of stress.

Indeed, this rapid return to a baseline relaxed state reflects the premise of Robert Sapolsky’s book Why zebras don’t get ulcers. It asserts that, while animals can and do experience a certain panic and stress in response to threats and physical pain, they don’t experience the same kind of continued mental strain associated with a higher cognitive awareness of past and future suffering. And if they survive a ‘traumatic’ event, unlike humans they usually quickly revert to baseline.

Likewise, in all my time sitting still in nature, watching the environment come alive around me, I have never gotten the impression that it’s an orgy of constant suffering. As the sun warms grassy hillsides the crickets and other insects do indeed raise their voices in chorus. Even with the knowledge that many of these insects will die that very day, it takes a certain kind of pathological, neurotic sensitivity to hear the sound of bug-song as the screaming of tortured souls.

Small frogs which literally freeze solid over night and thaw out in the morning, still croak to the stars as they freeze. When they thaw, they return to hopping, basking in the sun, and just generally lazing around. Sure, eventually something might eat them, or the cold will eventually kill them, but *newsflash* life ends.

And now on to the poor, dreaded r-strategists (Bentham’s Bulldog and others believe these species should be eradicated because of their effect on the “net suffering” calculus).

Who’s to say that the flood of baby turtles dashing for the ocean, don’t feel a certain pleasure and joy in the rush to fulfill their instincts? If indeed they are capable of such feelings, who’s to say they don’t feel elation as they drive their little flippers into the sand, smelling the salt and seeing the ocean come ever closer. Even if they get quickly snapped up by a hungry bird before reaching the ocean, who’s to say the few minutes of instinctive striving and experience didn’t outweigh or at least balance the pain of their death? And how do you quantify the pain of the turtle against the pleasure of the hungry bird?

And what about all the little turtles that do make it? Plunging from the hot sand over which they floundered, into the cool ocean through which they can now effortlessly glide, must be glorious. Surely the goodness and pleasure of their success should be factored into the utilitairan equation too?

The assertion that this whole, cumulative existence is inherently hellish and should be prevented from ever occurring arises, in my opinion, form a very neurotic and human-biased perception that something about it is unfair. It’s an inability to come to terms with reality.

Nature can be emotionally disturbing to certain meek people—especially those who spend all their time online debating about ideas and concepts and theories, and who never actually interact with the natural world. From the safety of their room and the warm glow of their computer, nature scares them. Acts of nature strike them as an injustice. They extrapolate their personal aversion into a universal value judgement which they impose on nature and reality. And it drives them to totalitarian and misaligned goals.

Don’t get me wrong, when I see a little turtle get eaten before it can reach the ocean, it makes me sad too. I imagine not reaching my goal, and my life ending seemingly just as it begun. There is something sad in this. But that’s nature; that’s part of the striving to exist and to live and to succeed in a universe of entropy. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. Should we take vengeance on reality and destroy nature—preventing all success and pleasure, just to prevent all failure and suffering? It’s such a weak, resentful, nihilistic take.

The horror

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’ve seen the horror of nature. Indeed I have inflicted pain of my own in hunting wild animals for my food, and I personally feel the sadness and aversion to this aspect of reality. I’ve seen the videos of lions pulling a half-born calf out of a mother and eating it. Nature can be horrific. Does that mean we should end it?

Bentham’s Bulldog thinks so:

Preserving the natural mechanism that keeps bringing animals into existence, only to kill them shortly thereafter, isn’t compassionate.

…

For a similar reason, I think that we should seek to reduce the extent of nature and the horrifying suffering it causes. If we in the future have the ability to reduce or mostly eliminate natural suffering, we should not hesitate to do so.

…

Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so.

These people want the world to be one giant cement parking lot, because cement is not conducive to natural life:

“If you’re concerned about wild animals, therefore, you should support paving over ecosystems.”

(That quote and its insane nihilism never ceases to blow my mind.)

But children get cancer. People kill each other. People die in house fires. All manner of suffering occurs to humans, too. What to do about that?

It seems that, based on their willingness to erase nature and wild animals, Bentham’s Bulldog and other utilitarians are one small step away from some veeeeery dark conclusions about what to do with humanity.

Go suffer!

People like Bentham’s Bulldog need to go and suffer in the way animals do.

Live in the mountains, watch the animals first hand, fall off a cliff yourself. Damn near freeze to death, go hungry. You’ll see it’s not that bad, and its worth the paradoxical pleasure and endorphins you get from natural suffering and the struggle to survive. It’s worth the moments of warmth, the moments of calm, the moments of a full belly, the joy of a near-miss. My guess is that the animals would agree.

When you go out into the mountains, you have that familiar yet weird realization that they have been just sitting there the whole time you were away from them—the mountains and their ecosystems don’t render as you approach, like a video game, they continue to exist completely separate from our human drama. They just continue on, largely in peace.

You could sit for days on end and not see anything horrific. A bird flitters by. A deer grazes and sunbathes, a falcon soars on a thermal. Crickets tick and sing in the grass. To actually observe the environment first hand over a long period of time—not just some highlights from a nature documentary which necessarily focus on the action-packed drama of predation and struggle and death—would disabuse you of any notion of nature being “hell”.

I’m not saying suffering is nothing. But it’s not everything.

Go for a hike, read Viktor Frankl, or do something

It’s hard not to think that these philosophies which hyper fixate on and exaggerate suffering, while downplaying the value of life and of striving, say something about their proponents.

As Nietzsche said, philosophy is:

“the confession of its originator, and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”

The anti-nature philosophy is the reflection a specific psychological type. One prone to neuroticism and self-awareness; a resentment of nature and reality, arising from a personal weakness; a reluctance to engage life and bear it’s pain for it’s pleasure.

Perhaps it arises from the knowledge that, in all likelihood, they themselves would likely be the little turtle that wouldn’t make it. That knowledge is then externalized onto nature. Once nature stands as a symbol of all the suffering and “injustice” that one cannot bear to face, one begins to wish for its destruction out of a supposed empathy.

To erase nature is not mercy, it’s vengeance.

I am going to dedicate one more short post—one slightly more substantive and philosophical—to this topic soon, pointing out the silly flaw at the center of the utilitarian attempt to calculate and compare “total suffering”. This idea leads to all sorts of silliness, like the idea that it would be morally better to torture one man for 50 years, than let a trillion people get a mildly annoying speck of dust in their eye, because… something something, total suffering.

But suffering is not experienced cumulatively, individual experience in non-aggregative. There is no “total pain”. The idea makes absolutely no sense. So look out for that in the coming weeks.

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This ended up becoming a short series, see the follow-up posts below:

and

Misspecified utilitarians hate existence

“Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so.”

- Bentham’s Bulldog

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For those who don’t know, utilitarianism is a moral philosophy which asserts that the morally right action in any given situation is the one which produces the greatest happiness or pleasure or well-being for the greatest number of beings, regardless of what that action is. It is generally the favored philosophy of the effective altruists.

It stands in contrast with other moral philosophies like deontology, which asserts that certain actions are right or wrong regardless of their outcome. Or virtue ethics, which asserts that that which is right is that which cultivates, or arises from, some set of virtues—such as courage, honesty, or wisdom.

Utilitarianism is dressed as a “scientific” or “mathematical” moral system, which is why it so easily aligns with modern reductionist frameworks. It calculates the right-ness or wrong-ness of various actions by calculating the “utility” or pleasure-maximizing and pain-minimizing function of various actions. It is therefore the most thoroughly “modern” moral philosophy, in that it contains this veneer of objectivity and scientism. It casts away the outdated notions of virtue so offensive to modern “inclusive” sensibilities. It also does away with the seemingly indefensible moral-realism of deontology.

Basically, it purports to circumvent simple moral intuitions, for intelligent and objective analyses of “the good”.

People rarely acknowledge however, that it simply replaces other moral-realist positions (such as the inherent goodness of the virtues) for another—the inherent goodness of pleasure and the inherent evil of suffering. They rarely acknowledge that this position is equally as indefensible as any other morally realist position, it suffers from all the same weaknesses and more.

But the real problem is that this pleasure maximizing goal, this weird moral calculus disconnected from notions of virtue or deontology, leads utilitarians to all sorts of weird and psychopathic conclusions.

A succinct introductory example is the thought-experiment1 known as the transplant case:

In the scenario, a surgeon has five patients, each in need of a different organ to survive: one needs a heart, one a liver, one lungs, etc. There are no available donors, and all five will die soon. Just then, a healthy man comes in for a routine checkup. The surgeon realizes that if he kills this healthy man and harvests his organs, he could save the five dying patients.

A simple utilitarian calculus would lead one to conclude that the five lives outweigh the one, and thus “within the stripped-down thought experiment… the operation should be performed, and utility-wise, rightly so.”

To virtue ethicists and to deontologists, such a conclusion is likely immoral on the face of it, but not so to utilitarians.

Now, in fairness, many utilitarians wouldn’t actually support killing the one healthy guy to save the five for any of a number of purely utilitarian reasons, such as, doing so would reduce people’s willingness to get check-ups at the doctor, lest they be unwittingly harvested for their organs—which would increase total suffering in the long run.

But this shows you how quickly utilitarian calculus can end up in weird and crazy places, and you end up having to seriously debate the “utility” of murdering a random innocent.

But, when you mix utilitarian philosophy with a certain type of person, you get real craziness.

Some people are so sensitive, so emotional, so ridden with pathological empathy—they find reality, existence, and nature so confronting to their neurotic disposition—that they drastically over-weight suffering in their moral calculus, and thus they justify all sorts of misanthropic, anti-natural, nihilistic views in the name of their “morality”. All in the name of “preventing suffering”.

One culprit: Bentham’s Bulldog

Take Bentham’s Bulldog (named after Jeremy Bentham, one of the prominent utilitarians) hereafter referred to as BB.

BB is a great essayist—better than I—but his aversion to suffering (that is to say, his aversion to reality and to nature) is so strong that he says some crazy stuff that, as an outdoorsman and nature-lover, I find really insane.

BB is, very honorably and rightly, concerned about the needless cruelty of factory farming and other cases of animal cruelty. But rather than being rooted in realistic worldviews which admit a certain amount of suffering, and which attempt hold up and to balance the many competing moral values. BB’s utilitarianism is rooted in an absolutist claim that all suffering is inherently bad—and that suffering is more bad than pleasure is good.

This makes him take a very negative view, not just of modern farming practices, but of nature itself, and he concludes that wild animals’ lives are not worth living:

let us, for a moment, ignore the fate of the baby octopi and merely focus on the life of the adult octopi. We can ask whether her life was worthwhile. The answer, it would seem, is a no, so resounding, it should ring out for miles.

The octopus is constantly on the run from sharks who have evolved to kill her efficiently. Blending in doesn’t work, for they detect their pray by sense of smell alone. They can reach their noses into very small places—leaving the octopus with no good place to hide. Imagine the constant stress and fear of the octopus, constantly on the run from assailants, desiring to tear her limb from limb.

It’s very easy to regard states of affairs as desirable when one doesn’t have to experience them. Grass does, after all, look greener in another’s backyard. Yet consider whether this life is really worth living—constantly on the run from sharks. Surely none of us would want to live on the constant run from sharks. And yet this is the fate of our invertebrate protagonist, who is propagandistically depicted as having a generally worthwhile existence.

Or, more succinctly:

If insects screamed in volume proportional to their suffering, nothing could be heard over the cries of insects.

From these and other excerpts (which, the more I read them, have a strange air of obsessive schizotypy—that quote above, about insects screaming, sounds like the kind of thing I’ve heard those with drug-induced psychosis fixate on) we can reasonably discern that BB is likely quite an anxious or neurotic person (no judgement, I have actually battled clinical level anxiety for years). He lets his emotional reactions, his fear of being preyed upon, his personal aversion to pain and fear of violence, dominate his thinking, and he externalizes this onto animals.

In essay after essay, BB advances highly dubious arguments that presume to know how strongly animals suffer in comparison to humans, claiming that shrimp, for example, “suffer about 3.1% as intensely as humans… [or even] 19% as intensely as humans” and that, given there are billions and billions of shrimp, their suffering can be mathematically shown to be more important than human suffering, and thus you should make your charitable donations to shrimp welfare rather than to human-benefitting charities. This obviously ignores the fact that suffering cannot be experienced by a collective. Individuals suffer, not groups, so you simply can’t add the suffering together like that and then compare across groups.

Regardless, he repeatedly points out how many wild animals exist:

The sheer number of these animals is utterly staggering. There are probably around 10^18 arthropods—and these are very likely conscious. If we make the fairly conservative assumption that this is 10% of the number of arthropods that die in a year, then that means that about 300 billion arthropods die each second.

Again:

In fact, this is a considerable underestimate. Brian Tomasik a while ago estimated the number of wild animals in existence. While there are about 10^10 humans, wild animals are far more numerous. There are around 10 times that many birds, between 10 and 100 times as many mammals, and up to 10,000 times as many both of reptiles and amphibians.

And he then hyper-fixates on how much suffering occurs in nature:

Most animals in nature live relatively short lives of intense suffering.

He presumes to know that insects lives are a “hellish nightmare”, and that “trillions of animals are crying out in pain. At least tens of billions, and perhaps even trillions, of animals die painfully every single second. Nearly every creature who ever lived had a short hellish life”, and that “Life is hell for almost every conscious creature who has ever lived.” There is an adolescent, histrionic tone here.

Based on this, he repeatedly insinuates, or outright asserts, that nature should be destroyed:

Preserving the natural mechanism that keeps bringing animals into existence, only to kill them shortly thereafter, isn’t compassionate.

and

For a similar reason, I think that we should seek to reduce the extent of nature and the horrifying suffering it causes. If we in the future have the ability to reduce or mostly eliminate natural suffering, we should not hesitate to do so.

and, this is one of the more insane ones:

Imagine that humans had all left earth and we could destroy the world, killing every living thing painlessly. I would, in an instant, support doing so.

and

Many environmentalists seem to look upon a torture chamber for quadrillions of beings and then assume we shouldn’t destroy any of it because it looks pretty. This is a truly grave error.

and

If you came across a natural factory farm, perhaps run by a particularly resourceful duck, the fitting action would be burning it to the ground. Even if the factory farm looked pretty—provided you ignore the blood and cries of terror, of course—that wouldn’t merit its continued existence. For a similar reason, I think that we should seek to reduce the extent of nature and the horrifying suffering it causes.

and

If you’re concerned about wild animals, therefore, you should support paving over ecosystems.

He endorses other crazy takes from people like Brian Tomasik, who asserts that everyone should pave over their lawns and gardens, because lawns and gardens provide an environment for insects to live, and insects suffer too much:

Most insects die soon after birth, and their lives probably contain more suffering than happiness. If you have a lawn that you actively maintain, you should consider converting your grass to hard landscape materials like gravel, or to artificial turf, to reduce plant biomass and therefore insect suffering.

And, even worse, he seems hopeful that some super intelligent AI could be enlisted in this mission to eradicate suffering by eradicating nature—an absolutely terrifying proposition:

It looks not extremely unlikely that fairly soon advanced AI will develop that will enable us to do something about very advanced problems. An AI superintelligence boom may be in the making. If this is so, then ideally we’ll try to get concern about wild animal suffering talked about, so that when the AIs have this ability, they’ll be likely to take actions to majorly reduce wild animal suffering.

A One-sided Calculus

All of this, again, rests on the assumption that pain is inherently bad. He says:

"Pain and suffering are bad because they hurt. Headaches are bad not because the people who have them can do calculus but because they feel bad."

But as I said in a comment to BB, how do you prove this?

If I have a headache, I personally don't like it, but is it to be considered universally or existentially bad? What does that even mean? And what if the pain arises from some healing process—is it still bad? Or what if the pain arises from some other organism's activities, one who is living in my brain and who is receiving pleasure and life saving nutrients? Is it still bad? According to who? This calculus is difficult in this one simple situation—on a large scale it is impossible.

Additionally, despite his apparent desire to quantify and calculate highly subjective experiences, he never even attempts to mathematically quantify how much pleasure animals cumulatively feel. Nor the value of hedonically neutral experiences, and whether these can be considered on one side or the other of his utilitarian calculations.

He simply performs a biased and dubious calculus, rooted in his own emotionality and aversion to pain, in order to quantify how much animals suffer, and in order to justify his willingness to destroy nature in order to end that suffering.

But such conclusions that life and its suffering are not worthwhile would require you to first also quantify how much good animals feel as well, no? Maybe those animals do get great pleasure form being alive, from eating, from mating? Maybe their in built instincts for survival do indeed provide enough pleasure in their few moments alive that their few moments of suffering and death are justified or worthwhile from their perspective?

If such a simple calculus of 'total suffering' could be performed to quantify whether life is worth it, then surely more humans going through hardship would take their own lives. It seems that even for humans—who likely have the greatest capacity for suffering—the few and temporary moments of ordinary life, with little suffering or pleasure, are enough to justify living through the suffering. So why would it not be the same for animals?

BB is not interested in quantifying sensations when it comes to pleasure, nor in explaining how he can be sure that animals don't instinctively feel that the moments without suffering perfectly justify their lives in spite of the suffering, as humans have in even the worst conditions.

Most humans have likely lived lives of more pain than pleasure, yet still elected to live them.

Even Victor Frankl and others in Nazi concentration camps found a horrific life to be entirely worth living. Maybe animals would make the same choice (indeed, the animals which BB claims have "have much more pain than pleasure" still seem very intent on living those lives). So how does he know that animals simply view their lives in terms of pain—they might still be perfectly willing to live lives that aren't hedonically positive.

Well, in response to these comments he says that

“I don't think that animals like shrimp have higher-order evaluations of their lives. And I don't think it's good to create miserable creatures even if they want to live after being created. One can be mistaken about whether their life is worth living.”

But, his entire argument for taking animal suffering seriously is that they are capable of higher-order consciousness and therefore capable of intense suffering. The ability to truly suffer likely requires certain higher order evaluations, self-awareness, anxiety, etc., beyond mere physical pain.

Regardless, he then openly says that he doesn’t care whether those animals would consider their lives worthwhile, he only cares whether he perceives their lives to be worthwhile, and because he apparently couldn’t personally muster the courage to live through suffering, he believes that animals shouldn’t either, and that their desire to live could be “mistaken”.

The Misspecification of Utilitarianism

As described, the simplistic obsession with maximizing pleasure results in many utilitarians and effective altruists behaving in crazy ways, like a misspecified artificial intelligence.

A great summary of misspecification can be seen in this article:

The fundamental problem of specification is that “it is often difficult or infeasible to capture exactly what we want an agent to do, and as a result we frequently end up using imperfect but easily measured proxies.”³ Thus, in a famous example from 2016, researchers at OpenAI attempted to train a reinforcement learning agent to play the boat-racing video game CoastRunners, the goal of which is to finish a race quickly and ahead of other players.⁴ Instead of basing the AI agent’s reward function on how it placed in the race, however, the researchers used a proxy goal that was easier to implement and rewarded the agent for maximizing the number of points it scored.

The researchers mistakenly assumed that the agent would pursue this proxy goal by trying to complete the course quickly. Instead, the AI discovered that it could achieve a much higher score by refusing to complete the course and instead driving in tight circles in such a way as to repeatedly collect a series of power-ups while crashing into other boats and occasionally catching on fire.⁵ In other words, the design specification (“collect as many points as possible”) did not correspond well to the ideal specification (“win the race”), leading to a disastrous and unexpected revealed specification (crashing repeatedly and failing to finish the race).

AI’s programmed to be “reward maximizers”—in the same way that utilitarians are “net pleasure” maximisers—often develop misspecification issues and end up doing unexpected and harmful or crazy things, such as runaway maximizers, of which “The silly but canonical example is an AI with a reward function with a soft spot for office supplies, so it converts all matter in the universe into paperclips… Reward maximizers are always unstable. Even very simple reinforcement learning agents show very crazy specification behaviors.”

This is what happens to utilitarians, their blind pursuit of reward maximization (the maximization of net pleasure), with no balancing virtues or deontological morality, leads them to all sorts of misspecified, ani-natural, nihilistic conclusions, such as supporting destroying almost all life in order to minimize suffering.

One could imagine an AI, after being instructed to “come up with a way to improve the lives of animals, by decreasing suffering”, leaping to the maximally effective but insane conclusion to “destroy all life, and thus end suffering”. This is exactly the kind of misspecification displayed by people like BB.

Don’t get me wrong, most peoples’ morality is based on a biased and dubious calculus, too, but at the very least the other moral frameworks, like deontology and virtue ethics, have a sort of pro-life bias built in that is safer, a belief that life and nature has some sort of inherent value beyond mere pleasure—that even suffering can have value. These other moral systems are cybernetic minimizers. They seek to limit the harm one does directly, in a more confined sphere of influence, and thus they are less totalizing and less blindly self-confident than the utilitarians—a virtue ethicist or deontologist is less likely to decide to kill everyone for their own good than the maximizing utilitarians.

We better pray to god that these hypersensitive utilitarians and EA’s don’t take control of society or create the AI superintelligence. Their totalitarian and, in-practice, psychopathic behavior (though rooted in a misspecified compassion) could lead them to kill us all for our own good, or to destroy nature to end suffering.

As BB says, he would “in an instant, support doing so.”

As I said above, this became a 3-part series of short essays! Read the the other two below:

In part 2, I outline how the idea that nature is “hellish” is not true, and is based on a neurotic sensitivity and an ignorance of nature.

Then, in part 3, I describe how the idea of “total suffering” or net utility, used in utilitarian calculations, is not real:

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Still, maybe I’ll delete this later.

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Last year, on the back of a pretty bad depressive episode, I flew to Toulouse, France, to attend a summer school for PhD candidates in the quantitative social sciences. By the time I landed in Paris I had already been moping (to put it lightly) for probably 6 weeks, and this depression—which has been with me, intermittently, for as long as I can remember—had followed me to France.

The summer school was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (the IAST), and was quite rigorous. They even had us simple social psychologists and anthropologists doing complex algebra, which went about as well as you’d think. The program had, perhaps, slightly less political-ideological bias than was typical for such programs in the social sciences (perhaps attributable to its quantitative focus)—though there were a few extremely woke students there. They tended to dominate most conversations, making sweeping and intuitively satisfying claims and moral proclamations with little empirical backing (unless you consider a few qualitative studies on, say, ‘restorative justice’ with n = 21 convincing).

The other less vociferous students either agreed with these claims, or they (like me) had major issues with the claims and the validity of the underlying arguments, but they were not willing to stick their necks out. In these settings it’s not worth starting a whole debate and probably spending the rest of the program branded with some scarlet word ending with an “ist”. (In fairness, there were a handful of people there with whom I did become good friends, and who are genuinely great and intellectually honest people, regardless of disagreements we may have).

Anyway, I arrived in Toulouse about a week before the program started, and for some reason I felt compelled to spend most of my ‘tourist’ time visiting the many ancient churches peppered throughout the city. I was still depressed. I spent many hours wandering the cracked and flaky pews, staring sadly up into the face of some saint, lighting candles at alters. My original partition from ‘The Church’ (losing my religion in my early teens) was an incredibly painful process that I’m not sure I ever recovered from, and I have a residual affinity for Christian imagery.

One warm evening, while crowds of locals gathered for the nightly summer tradition of drinks and socialization along the banks of the Garonne, I went to see the Orchestre Philharmonia Tolosa and the Choeur Symphonique de Toulouse play Mozart’s Requiem in the Basilique Notre Dame la Daurade. The Basilique is a catholic church with roots in the 5^th century as a Roman temple, but which was completed in its modern iteration in the late 19^th century. It’s a beautiful, grand, ornate church.

I attended the concert partly in the hopes that I would feel something uplifting and profound. My depressive episode had me feeling vacant and lost and hopeless, and I was hoping that some empty part of me would be touched by the music and the church. The concert was beautiful. The Requiem is a haunting piece, written to accompany a Requiem Mass (a Funeral Mass). It’s a prayer for the repose of the dead.

But about halfway through the concert I was overcome by a sudden, acute sorrow—a nostalgia for something—and my eyes began to run. It was a feeling of phantom limb, a sense of loss, for something I maybe never had and now probably never will.

I felt a strange sadness for all of us in that church. I imagined everyone there felt as I did, that we were hopelessly trying to grasp for something that was long gone… But I was probably just projecting.

I was reminded of a trope from some zombie movies, in which the zombies eventually return to their places of work, standing sadly at their former supermarket counters or at their desks, as if some small part of them remembers that there was something they were supposed to be doing, a role they played. Sitting in the Basilique, this is how I felt. It was as if we were spiritual zombies who had been called there by a vestigial instinct, implicitly knowing there was something we were supposed to be doing, but were not exactly sure what, or how to do it.

Or I imagined a world where the adults and adolescents had suddenly died or had been raptured away, leaving only the children. I pictured these leftover children, with no other ideas, returning to school and sitting at their desks expectantly, knowing there was something they should be doing, some function or role they were supposed to be performing there, but unsure what it was or why it was so important before.

I sat there in that beautiful church and listened to the concert, quietly half-crying. Realising I was a one-man cargo-cult, showing my airplane to the sky in the hope of some incoming manna. Realising that the music and the setting may never touch me in the way that I hoped it would. Too much had changed.

We in that church were the survivors of some slow meaning-apocalypse, the leftovers, wandering the ruins of a higher culture. Born years too late to truly connect to it, to appreciate it, or to preserve it.

Or maybe I was just projecting.

And maybe it’s not too late.

Happy Easter!

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Here’s a good old hunting story with some nice photos, to cheer you up:

Free Kiwis Podcast

Last week I appeared on the Free Kiwis podcast, hosted by Dr James Kierstead and Dr Michael Johnston. The podcast focusses on free speech in the New Zealand context, but often—as with my episode—free speech does not actually come up as significant topic of discussion. It is a place for academics and others to discuss culture, politics, philosophy, very often from a heterodox point of view.

Being an introverted PhD candidate riddled with imposter syndrome I was actually quite nervous, but I think the discussion went well. Below I provide sources and comments of articles/ideas discussed in the podcast.

Affective Polarization

First, we discussed affective polarization.

Below you can see one figure of a trend I described, in which there has been a steady decline in warmth towards the out-group since about the 70s (in the US), while in-group affect remained stable.

We also discussed the early debate around the extent or existence of polarization. Initially, there was debate because researchers were primarily measuring ideological polarization. Abramowitz and Saunders insisted mass polarization was occurring:

While Fiorina et al disagreed:

But when polarization was measured using affective indicators, the picture became much clearer:

US citizens were more affectively polarized than ever, despite largely remaining centrists with more cross-cutting beliefs than they thought. This was termed “uncivil agreement”:

This affective polarization has many negative effects, with prejudice based on partisanship often exceeding that based on race or gender:

Authoritarianism

We also discussed the biased history and nature of authoritarianism research. I mention this article which I highly recommend. It first outlines many of the issues with authoritarianism research, before showing how these biases are replicated in the breathless and histrionic Christian nationalism research.

I provided an accessible review of this paper here:

And below I provide a list of resources on left wing authoritarianism and the debate around its existence and attempts to measure it, and its associations with dark triad and other traits:

Conway, L. G., Houck, S. C., Gornick, L. J., & Repke, M. A. (2018). Finding the Loch Ness Monster: Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the United States: Left-Wing Authoritarianism in the United States. Political Psychology, 39(5), 1049–1067. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12470

Conway, L. G., McFarland, J. D., Costello, T. H., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2021). The curious case of left‐wing authoritarianism: When authoritarian persons meet anti‐authoritarian norms. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology, 5(4), 423–442. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts5.108

Conway, L. G., Zubrod, A., & Leslie, J. D. (2022). Constructing a Four-Item Left-Wing Authoritarianism Scale [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/x7gp9

Costello, T. H., Bowes, S. M., Stevens, S. T., Waldman, I. D., Tasimi, A., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2022). Clarifying the structure and nature of left-wing authoritarianism. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(1), 135–170. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000341

Costello, T. H., & Patrick, C. (2022). Development and Initial Validation of Two Brief Measures of Left-wing Authoritarianism: A Machine Learning Approach. Journal of Personality Assessment, 105(2), 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1080/00223891.2022.2081809

de Regt, S., Mortelmans, D., & Smits, T. (2011). Left-wing authoritarianism is not a myth, but a worrisome reality. Evidence from 13 Eastern European countries. Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 44(4), 299–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.postcomstud.2011.10.006

Krispenz, A., & Bertrams, A. (2023). Understanding left-wing authoritarianism: Relations to the dark personality traits, altruism, and social justice commitment. Current Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-023-04463-x

Krispenz, A., Hautle, L., Schmid, B. M., & Bertrams, A. (2024). Shining the light on left-wing authoritarianism in austria, germany, and switzerland. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/8756d

Identity Satiation and Therapy Culture

We also discussed my article on how one experiences “inhibition” or “satiation” and “ironic uncertainty” from repeatedly triggering concepts, compulsively checking, and perseveratively introspecting.

This aligns with others like Abigail Shrier, Jonathan Haidt, Ivan Illich, etc., who assert that widespread therapy culture constitutes a “universal intervention” rather than a targeted one. And it comes with many downsides and harmful iatrogenic effects.

The therapeutic worldview insists that introspecting, labelling, engaging with, and understanding all of ones negative thoughts and feelings is the best way to deal with them. Similar ideas are pushed when it comes to identity, self-perception, and self-understanding. I and others assert that this actually results in paradoxical uncertainty, derealization and depersonalization, and the kind of bodily integrity and identity congruence issues we now see widespread throughout our therapeutic society.

Hunting

I also discussed my initial attempts at veganism, and my current hunting and meat eating.

See a twitter thread I wrote with some beautiful pictures from the NZ backcountry here:

I also discussed how hunting can serve as a cure for postmodern disenchantment and alienation from nature. As discussed in these articles:

Full Podcast

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This is another altered version of a short article first published in Quillette. It’s a bit more polemical than I would maybe write today. If I wrote it today, I would have included examples of right wing pious fraud for balance.

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The Improvers of Mankind

In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche devotes a short chapter to a group of people of whom he does not think very highly: the so-called "improvers of mankind". A primary tactic of the Improvers, which Nietzsche identifies, is that of "pia fraus", or pious fraud. This is a kind of lie often told, in Nietzsche’s time, by religious men, prophets, priests, or shaman; supposedly moral people who would, ostensibly, usually be averse to deceit. The pious fraud is a lie told by pious people—true believers—in the service of some supposed larger truth, some higher good.

An example of pious fraud comes from the ancient priests who secretly scarred their hands in the manner of the crucifixion and then presented their stigmata as a miracle—a message from God to their followers. Such pious fraud is performed in the belief that the ends justify the means. What does it matter if the lie is not true in fact, when it is true in spirit? In the priest's mind, though this specific instance is not a miracle, God does perform miracles. Thus, to the priest, he is deceiving his followers­ only on the technical details—but if in doing so he converts many new people to Christianity and ensures their heavenly salvation, then is he not justified?

Many priests, shaman, and mediums know they are committing a fraud with their “miracles”. But in their minds, because it may bring their followers salvation, peace of mind, or closure, then the lie is vindicated. Many doctors, quacks, and homeopaths also use pious fraud. Again, for them, the ends justify the means: "So, what if the medicines I peddle are so often merely sugar pills or coloured oils”, they think, “the medications bring my patients relief through their belief and therefore the treatments are, in some sense, also real." Again, the lie, in their minds, is vindicated.

The willingness to engage in pious fraud arises through a mechanism known as moral licensing. Moral licensing occurs when one believes that their moral goals or good behaviour grants them “license” to do immoral things. Moral licensing is also tied to victimhood status; those who perceive themselves as victims are more likely to use such a status to exempt themselves from normal codes of moral conduct. This brings us to the new improvers of mankind: the modern Left. Or at least a subset of it: the social-justice-left. They believe they are working for cosmic justice and universal good and they view themselves as victims­­­—double the moral license!

Nietzsche, in an incredible feat of prophetic insight, said that there are those who "constantly bear the word 'justice' in their mouths like poisonous spittle, always with pursed lips, always ready to spit upon all who are not discontented but go their own way in good spirits…The will of the weak to represent some form of superiority, their instinct for devious paths to tyranny over the healthy". This is moral licensing in effect. Many on the social-justice-left are pious true believers with a victimhood complex, they believe that they act solely in service of the greater good—“justice”—and thus have the moral license and a “blank check” to do whatever is necessary, including peddle outright lies and use deception.

Pious Fraud and Social Justice

The social-justice-left frequently utilize pious fraud. They believe that though a particular claim they use to advance their goals may not be literally true, it does reflects some larger truth, and thus this pious fraud can be used as a weapon in their crusade to "improve" mankind and facilitate "social justice". Therefore, in their minds, because their lies are true in spirit if not in actual fact, then the ends justify the means.

For example, pious fraud was used by Jussie Smollett, and those who continued to support him, when he faked a hate crime against himself. While Jussie and his supporters know that his claim is false (the pious lie), they believe that white supremacy and homophobia are ubiquitous (the larger "truth" reflected by the lie), and that Jussie was merely attempting to bring attention to this larger truth, to fight racism, and improve mankind. Therefore, in their minds, his lie was justified. This is not an isolated case. There was the Nascar hate crime found by the FBI to be a hoax, the mass graves hoax in Canada, or the numerous hoaxes documented by the political scientist Wilfred Reilly, who documented hundreds of hoaxes in his book. Reilly says:

"The deeper I delved, the more it seemed that this phenomenon of fake hate crimes did not appear to be small-scale or regionally isolated. I put together a fairly large database of hate-crime allegations...A majority of these incidents, which were almost all initially reported with a great deal of fanfare and breast-beating, were later exposed as hoaxes. Well, in truth, “exposed” is a gross exaggeration. Evidence demonstrated that they were fake hate crimes. But that fact got very little exposure in the press—particularly in comparison with the initial publicity they generated. The headlines that had touted each case as a horrific example of contemporary bigotry vanished from the Internet".

If you followed the discourse around many of these hoaxes, you would have seen a surprising amount of continued support for the 'victims', and a desperate clinging to the narrative from the social-justice-left. Many activists exhibited the typical rationalizations of the pious fraudster: "well this case might not be true, but society is racist and homophobic", and thus the pious lies were justified. The ends justify the means, even if the means are widespread deception and exaggeration.

There are many examples of these pious lies sold by the social-justice-left (and it must be noted that I once considered myself a member of the political left). Claims of widespread large discriminatory pay disparity between men and women; the denial of the sex binary; and claims of impending 'genocide' against trans people, the claim that black babies fare worse under white doctors, are just some examples of pious lies sold by the left. They think that such false claims are justified because they can be used to “improve” mankind and facilitate cosmic justice in the form of equity. Look at almost any major social issue fixated on by the social-justice-left and you find distortion, lies, or misleading half-truths. Truth is sacrificed in service of their holy war against "injustice" or "inequity".

It must be noted, in fairness, that I don’t think the Right has any special claim to universal honesty (humans in general are prone to lying), but the nature of the social-justice worldview, which is one of a moral crusade against cosmic injustice, currently lends itself more to this kind of pious deceptiveness. Additionally, because of the political leanings of major institutions and media platforms, leftists pious lies receive much more support and less criticism.

A further example of pious fraud by social-justice-left (climate justice is now a huge aspect of the SJL program) is the reflexive, baseless insistence that every extraordinary weather event, storm, hurricane, or fire is a result of climate change. Extreme weather events have always occurred, humanity has always had to contend with unexpected floods, fires, and storms. And while I do agree that human activity may be affecting the climate and is certainly harming biodiversity, to claim—as climate alarmists do—that every extreme weather event is directly a result of anthropogenic climate change is so baseless as to constitute a lie. But again, the logic of the pious fraudster is applied: "so what if there is no way to know if this storm or fire is not directly climate change related, climate change is happening (and having disparate or unequal impacts on favored groups), therefore we are justified in making these false claims if it promotes climate action".

Stephen Schneider, a leading member of a climate working group for the IPCC, displayed some subtle logic of the pious fraudster when he said:

"On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both."

This reflects the commitment of the pious fraudster to the end goals of his ideology over truth. Although he did add that he “hopes” they can be honest, this is not very reassuring. He said that they “have to” emphasize simple, scary, dramatic statements with doubts and uncertainty omitted. Clearly, he acknowledges that, in the pursuit of climate action, there are goals above truth or honesty—“generating support” and “capturing the public’s imagination” among them. This behaviour distorts the entire information ecosystem, and creates supposedly truth-seeking institutions and cultures which are completely perverted away from their mission—engaged now in advocacy and propaganda, not committed to delivering the full picture.

The Problem with Pious Fraud

The problem with pious fraud is that attempts to bring about some 'improvement' through deception often makes life worse for everyday people. Pious lies, while ostensibly in the service of a greater good, harm the people whom the social-justice-left supposedly care about. If the pious lies are believed, they can create social movements and social panics which are largely based on a web of fabricated events and exaggerations. Entire worldviews and movements can be built, in large part, on a body of interconnected falsehoods. This destroys common sense-making, impedes effective policy design, and—given the social-justice-left’s focus on race and gender specifically—erodes social trust and cohesion.

Fundamentally, the pious improvers of mankind lie and exaggerate because they believe it is their job to make decisions on behalf of others, they believe that they know best, that they act solely in the service of some greater good—and that truth and transparency can be sacrificed in the service of their holy mission. In reality, Nietzsche would say, many of them are simply acting out their resentment, through which they can achieve some form of retribution for perceived cosmic injustices.

"This is the great, uncanny problem which I have been pursuing the longest: the psychology of the 'improvers' of mankind. A small and modest fact—that of the so-called pia fruas [pious fraud]… the heirloom of all philosophers and priests who "improved" mankind. [They] have never doubted their right to lie." (Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols).

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If you enjoy my writing and are inclined to do so, please buy me a coffee!

I am not alone in wondering why the people and groups most inclined to focus on their identity, self-care, and 'knowing' themselves appear to actually be the most distressed, confused, and mentally unwell. Why has mental health gotten worse, and identity disorders increased, alongside the societal emphasis on self-care and accurately knowing and expressing oneself? Is it possible that the new therapy culture and the emphasis on introspection actually makes us more confused and unwell?

This idea is not without precedent, and I am certainly not the first to make this claim. Abigail Shrier’s book Bad Therapy expertly delineated this argument. However, there is a range of relevant phenomena that I don’t often see discussed, and which could further lend credence to this idea. These are the research on semantic satiation and ironic uncertainty, the effects of mirror gazing, the effects of meditation, and how these all relate to the constant introspection (essentially rumination) which is pushed on young people through therapy culture and the attendant concept creep.

Semantic Satiation

Semantic satiation is the uncanny sensation that occurs when one repeats a word or sentence again and again, until it appears foreign, nonsensical, and utterly meaningless to the speaker. You may have done this as a child, repeating a word in quick succession until you seem to no longer recognize what the word is or what it means. It's a highly reliable effect - you can try it now with any word. Repeat it to yourself quickly, out loud, for an extended period, and really focus on the word and its meaning. Under these circumstances, most people experience semantic satiation; the word loses all meaning or sounds nonsensical.

This is a well-studied phenomenon, sometimes under different labels such as "inhibition", "fatigue", "lapse of meaning", "adaptation", "stimulus satiation" and others. It doesn’t only occur in the linguistic realm, but visually as well. Studies have shown that compulsive staring at an object can result in dissociation and derealization: a sense that one no longer recognizes the object, or that it is no longer meaningful. Likewise, repeatedly visually checking something can make one uncertain of one's perception, and result, ironically, in uncertainty and poor memory of the object. This may also occur with facial recognition.

More interestingly, however, a similar phenomenon occurs in the realm of self-perception. Mirror gazing (staring into one’s own eyes in the mirror) is known to induce feelings of depersonalization and derealization, and result in distortions of self-perception and bodily sensation. This persistent visual self-inspection can result in one feeling that they don't recognize their own face, that they no longer feel real, that their body no longer feels the same as it once did or that it is not their body. It is in fact so reliable in producing these depersonalization and realization effects (and a wide range of other anomalous effects), that the mirror gazing task can be used in experimental manipulations to trigger these symptoms for research.

This effect doesn’t only occur with visual self-inspection, but with mental introspection too. I call it "identity satiation". This has been known for thousands of years and is the basis of many Buddhist and other spiritual practices. It has long been known, in meditative practices, that extended periods of introspection and self-contemplation result in a sense of identity loss and depersonalization-derealization. A well-known disorder, depersonalization-derealization has eerily familiar sounding symptoms. It “affects your ability to recognize your thoughts, feelings and body as your own”.

Buddhists developed many practices designed to induce this feeling, such as the practice of spending extended periods of time trying to "find" where one is located in one’s body until, unsuccessful, one experiences identity loss, depersonalization, and derealization. This process of introspection is like trying to tightly grip a bar of soap, the more you try to perceive yourself the harder it becomes. Other practices have practitioners focus on or "listen" intensely to their thoughts for extended periods of time, until they no longer identify with their train of thought and come to feel separated from their internal monologue. This is identity satiation at work, and it occurs through this persistent introspection.

Not surprisingly then, it is also well known in psychiatry that rumination—a kind of persistent introspection and a compulsive focus on one’s internal sensations, thoughts, or identity—is one of the hallmarks of anxiety disorders of various kinds, as well as disorders such as depersonalization-derealization. People who ruminate–engaging in compulsive introspection–can become increasingly uncertain, anxious, and confused.

These phenomena provide an explanation for the worsening mental health outcomes of young people who are now constantly encouraged to reflexively explore and inspect their own feelings and identities until they can label every aspect of themselves, and to do so during a stage of life in which their bodies and identities are in a state of flux. The school curricula and the social dialogue dominating in the West features endless discussions of identity and encourages constant introspection (essentially, rumination). These replicate thought patterns which have been shown to result in poorer understanding and more confusion, and which inadvertently end up broaching complex topics that have occupied serious philosophers for years (such as cartesian dualism). This likely results in identity satiation, both through the semantic satiation of the words associated with various identity concepts, and through whatever mechanism drives the depersonalization-derealization effects of meditation and rumination.

Therefore, this proliferation of therapy culture—ostensibly spread to encourage self-knowing and mental well-being—has erroneously pushed behaviors thought to be the cure, but which for most people are actually the poison. The constant introspection has only left people more confused and uncertain about their own identities than ever.

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The Satiation of Gender Identity.

The number of people identifying as non-binary or trans has skyrocketed in recent years, and an increasing number of schools are now teaching and discussing gender-theory content with children. While this may be beneficial for those already organically struggling with gender confusion, it may present an avenue for otherwise cis children to ruminate and become confused via identity satiation.

The kind of gender-theory content increasingly being taught in schools encourages children to spend extended periods of time ruminating on self-concepts which most would not otherwise have engaged or struggled with. They are given exercises which encourage them to doubt their own unconscious intuitions about themselves, and to sit and think (ruminate): "Do I feel like a boy? What does that even mean, to feel like a boy? I thought I was a boy but what if I am not?".

These questions, about what it "feels" like to be x or y, are often confusing and difficult to verbalize, even for the most unquestioningly cis adult. But to have children ruminate on such elusive concepts may lead to confusion and depersonalization-derealization via the mechanisms described above. Clearly this confusion, or identity satiation, could lead them to decide they are non-binary or trans, especially when combined with the amount of social recognition and social support that comes with identifying as such. There are many people who describe this happening to them, and who subsequently de-transitioned: "I never thought about my gender or had a problem with being a girl before".

Decades of psychological literature on neuroticism and mental illness, the well-established literature on rumination and mental health, and also the concepts discussed here, from cognitive psychology, all support the idea that the modern obsession with identity and self-knowledge is likely misguided and harmful. Persistent introspection - rumination - is the hallmark of many psychological disorders, and it may actually make self-knowledge more difficult.

While increased self-awareness and introspection are humanity's primary innovations over the other animals, it is an ability meant to be used sparingly and strategically. One's awareness should primarily directed outwards (entire schools of therapy are focused on teaching people how to turn their focus from inward facing to outward facing, in order to lessen distress and anxiety). We should not encourage young people–or anyone really–to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to consciously grasp who or what they are through pure introspection. Being an "ultra-social" animal, our identities are socially negotiated: it is from our social interactions and our natural interactions with the external world that we receive most of the information which informs our self-concept. Therefore, we should encourage young people to just be, and let their identity form through organic interactions with the world, through instinctive play and social interaction with others, and from only occasional introspection and exercises in 'self-knowing'.

For most people identity-formation is a sub-conscious process, and it should remain so.

If you enjoy my writing and are inclined to do so, please buy me a a coffee!

If you enjoy my writing and are inclined to do so, please buy me a coffee!

In their article A Model of Political Bias in Social Science Research, Honeycutt and Jussim describe four potential situations that can arise in the canonization of scientific knowledge.

Canonization, they say:

refers to the process by which research findings and conclusions become part of a field’s accepted and established base of knowledge… The social sciences currently have processes, but no consensus or norms, regarding the standards to be used to canonize a finding or conclusion…

It is currently an unclear combination of popularity, prestige, having the right allies and supporters, compellingness of narrative, and validity… Except for validity, none of these factors constitute grounds for claiming a finding or conclusion is actually true.

In regards to the canonization of research findings and conclusions, Honeycutt and Jussim lay out four possible situations:

The first is when invalid research is ignored, which results in no major harm done.

The second is when valid research is ignored, which results in a loss of understanding in which the scientific community and the public are deprived of relevant knowledge.

The third is the Ideal situation, wherein valid research is canonized. This results in positive contributions to the field’s accepted base of knowledge, and improves our scientific understanding.

The final potential outcome—which is, unfortunately, probably most descriptive of the performance of the social sciences over the past 60 years—is what they call The Reign of Error. This is when invalid research and conclusions are canonized and accepted into the field’s accepted base of knowledge, and then disseminated to, and accepted by, much of the public.

Ideological Homogeneity in the Social Sciences

It’s well known that social science—and academia in general—is largely ideologically homogeneous. There are of course many disagreements and conflicts in the social sciences, but these are simply cosmetic disagreements concerning which particular school of leftist analysis is the right one. It does not constitute an actual substantive diversity of opinion.

At this point I am sure all readers will have seen the images which often do the rounds on X:

There are many debates surrounding these statistics, such as whether this homogeneity is evidence of discrimination against dissenters and political outgroup members.

Leftists typically cite the (very small) average IQ difference between leftists and rightists as evidence that academia is dominated by leftists simply because they are smarter. However, the difference, if it does exist, is small, and this doesn’t explain why the fields with higher IQ’s, such as engineering and chemistry, have the lowest ratio of leftists to rightists.

While Honeycutt and Jussim do outline how this ideological homogeneity likely did arise, in part, due to discrimination and institutional obstacles holding rightists back, that is not the point of this essay (though see the following screenshot from The Radicalization of the American Academy).

The point is, regardless of how it arose, the ideological homogeneity in the social sciences undermines the generation and canonization of valid scientific knowledge in these fields.

The problem is, as outlined by Clark and Winegard in Tribalism in War and Peace: The Nature and Evolution of Ideological Epistemology and Its Significance for Modern Social Science, human beings evolved to be tribal epistemologists. That is, our tribal instincts distort our information processing, driving motivated cognition:

“this ideological epistemology can become especially problematic for the pursuit of the truth when groups are ideologically homogenous and hold sacred values that might be contradicted by empirical inquiry.”

The scientific method rests on processes of critique and correction, a sort of zig-zagging towards valid knowledge over time—a process which is undermined by homogeneous environments in which there is not sufficient viewpoint diversity to catch out and correct for the biases of tribal epistemology. If everyone holds the exact same underlying sacred values and first principles, then flaws and errors will escape attention when findings support the group’s favored narratives.

Science literally depends on proper viewpoint diversity.

As Clark and Winegard note

[people] do not, on average, treat ideologically congruent and incongruent information similarly; rather, they engage in ideological epistemology such that they treat congruent information more favorably and charitably [called motivated credulity] and treat incongruent information less favorably and more critically [called motivated skepticism].

For example:

These dual instincts of motivated credulity and skepticism are so strong that they can undermine scientific critique and, in the presence of ideological homogeneity, result in the reign of error.

Even structural and institutional guardrails which are designed preserve the scientific process (such as peer review) don’t function properly in this environment.

Consequences

The ideological homogeneity and the relative extremity of researchers (who, like all humans, often behave as tribal epistemologists) in the social sciences then sways the scientific literature and perpetuates the reign of error.

Ideological homogeneity:

1. Limits what questions get asked, and how.

   Social pressure, institutional pressure, threat of reprisal and or punishment for asking “heterodox” questions, purity spirals, and premature scientific foreclosure all serve to constrict and limit what questions one is allowed to ask, what will get funded, and what is likely to get published.

   An example of this are the research findings, and widespread belief, that conservatives are more prejudiced, intolerant, and biased than leftists. It turns out that researchers had unintentionally only measured prejudice against typically left-leaning target groups. So naturally, rightists showed more prejudice. However, when the scope of research questions are broadened to include stereotypically right leaning targets, prejudice among leftists and rightists appears largely balanced:

   

   In the paper shown above, Duarte et al. show that in much of the political psychology research, researchers had not studied a broad enough range of situations, and ignored a number of other relevant questions, which would have shown that:

   biased political judgments are not predicted by ideological orientation (as per Altemeyer), but rather by the qualities of the judgment scenarios used in the research.

2. Measurement.

   Relatedly, the tendency to favor ideologically congenial research and findings means that the very way constructs are operationalized and measured in psychology can be flawed, and these flaws then often escape critique, especially when the findings align with other researchers’ ideology.

   

   As stated in the screenshot:

   “Reyna (2018) reviewed a wide variety of common proxy measures (system justification, symbolic racism, and the implicit association test [IAT]) and concluded that all implicitly import potentially unjustified ideological assumptions.”

   I wrote about this issue in this X thread, and more here:

   And here:

3. Interpretation.
   Tribal epistemology can also influence science by swaying the interpretation of research findings. Findings are almost always interpreted in a congenial way for leftists, and in a derogatory manner for rightists:

   For example, Lilienfeld (2015) pointed out that the robust finding that conservatives are more sensitive to threat than are liberals has been framed as “negativity bias” or “motivated closed-mindedness” (they could just as readily been framed as liberal “positivity bias” or “motivated blindness to danger”).

   

   

   Or in these two great examples, from Clark and Winegard:

4. Citation Bias.

   As stated by Honeycutt and Jussim:

   Political motivations and blinders may also distort scientific literatures by influencing which studies researchers emphasize. This can manifest in many ways, one of which is citations. Although papers can be cited for many reasons, some are that researchers consider them relevant, valuable, or important. However, it is also possible that many researchers selectively cite and emphasize work that they agree with… based on political content rather than scientific quality.

   This can be seen in the citation rates of a study consisting of five experiments (n = 873) which found bias in hiring favoring women, vs a study consisting of one experiment (n = 127), which found a bias favoring men:

   

   The poorer quality paper finding bias against women received over a thousand citations since 2015. Whereas the paper finding bias against men received only 194 citations in the same period (and was on the receiving end of some controversy).

   Also, more broadly but on the same topic, papers finding no biases or biases in favor of women have much larger samples, but receive a faction of the yearly citations:

   

   A few other examples:

   

   

   

   

   This all reflects the selective citation, and thus the selective the canonization, of research findings according to their ideological congeniality (as citations are everything in academia, and pretty accurately reflect the scientific standing of a theory or finding).

5. Exaggeration of effects.

   As outlined in Clark and Winegard, another way science is undermined is through the selective exaggeration of effects which are ideologically congenial.

   For example:

   

   

   

6. Ignored alternative hypotheses.

   Clark and Winegard also note that

   Studies require interpretation, and the act of interpretation often reveals biases. In the social sciences, many papers ignore plausible hypotheses, likely because those hypotheses violate the sacred values of equalitarianism.

This section of the paper is longer and somewhat controversial, so I’ll leave you to read it on your own (p. 13 in the Clark and Winegard reference).

The Reign of Error

Is it any wonder, then, that the social sciences find themselves in both a replication crisis and a trust crisis?

The social sciences have been allowed to become an ideologically pure echo chamber of leftist equalitarians, who (like all humans) are prone to tribal epistemology, moral panics, and purity spirals.

The uniform commitment to critical social justice and other leftist schools of thought, with little opportunity for pushback or rigorous discussion, means that these fields are not reliably capable of producing valid scientific knowledge (at least on politicized topics), unless it happens to align with the fields’ dominant worldview.

Thus the social sciences very often function as fields for producing propaganda:

And if you’re a vulnerable academic, PhD candidate, or undergrad, and you commit heresy against the political dogmas ascendant in the social sciences, you’ll likely be punished by the regime of New McCarthyism.

And that’s a sad state of affairs for PhD candidates like myself to enter into.

I’ll entertain job offers elsewhere, if you have any.

If you enjoy my writing and are inclined to do so, please buy me a a coffee!

Relevant selected references:

Honeycutt, N., & Jussim, L. (2020). A Model of Political Bias in Social Science Research. Psychological Inquiry, 31(1), 73–85. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1722600

Jussim, L. (2012). Liberal privilege in academic psychology and the social sciences: Commentary on inbar & lammers (2012). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 504–507. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612455205

Jussim, L., Crawford, J. T., Anglin, S. M., Stevens, S. T., & Duarte, J. L. (2016). Interpretations and methods: Towards a more effectively self-correcting social psychology. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 66, 116–133. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2015.10.003

Jussim, L., & Honeycutt, N. (2023). Psychology as Science and as Propaganda. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 22(3), 237–244. https://doi.org/10.1177/14757257231195347

Jussim, L., Honeycutt, N., Careem, A., Bork, N., Finkelstein, D., Yanovsky, S., & Finkelstein, J. (n.d.). The New Book Burners, 8-17-23.

Jussim, L., Honeycutt, N., Paresky, P., Careem, A., Finkelstein, D., & Finkelstein, J. (2023). The Radicalization of the American Academy. In J. P. Zúquete (Ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Left-Wing Extremism, Volume 2 (pp. 343–366). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36268-2_19

Clark, C. J. (n.d.). Exerting Scientific Authority for Political Ends Undermines Scientific Authority.

Clark, C. J., Liu, B. S., Winegard, B. M., & Ditto, P. H. (2019). Tribalism Is Human Nature. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(6), 587–592. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721419862289

Clark, C. J., & Winegard, B. M. (2020). Tribalism in War and Peace: The Nature and Evolution of Ideological Epistemology and Its Significance for Modern Social Science. Psychological Inquiry, 31(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1721233

Conway, L. G., Zubrod, A., & Chan, L. (2020). The Paradox of the Tribal Equalitarian. Psychological Inquiry, 31(1), 48–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2020.1722018

Duarte, J. L., Crawford, J. T., Stern, C., Haidt, J., Jussim, L., & Tetlock, P. E. (2015). Political diversity will improve social psychological science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, e130. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430

Winegard, B. M. (n.d.). EQALITARIANISM: A SOURCE OF LIBERAL BIAS.

Winegard, B., & Winegard, B. M. (2015). A social science without sacred values. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.1.4542.5368

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When we touched down on the tops of Marlborough’s Raglan Range on a sunny day in Late November, I had been back in New Zealand for less than a week. For the five months preceding I had been couped up in a tiny studio apartment in Perth’s city centre and living almost exclusively within a 5km radius of the apartment. In that entire time, my Garmin watch never registered an altitude change of more than about 20 meters.

Though I was living just off of Riverside Drive, one of the most beautiful streets in Perth, lined with giant palms and with a view across the Swan River to South Perth, I dearly missed New Zealand. I missed the bush. I missed the mountains. I missed being at altitude and looking down on folded waves of misty ridgelines, with miles of country to glass. I missed being a part of an ecosystem, hunting and butchering and eating wild game.

From the day I landed in Perth five months ago, this trip to Marlborough had been on the books. Me, my dad, and my two older brothers, Dan and Reon, had been looking forward to it all that time. I was a bit worried about my hill fitness. I had been running along the Swan River in Perth, and hitting the gym in preparation, but I knew that no exercise on a level plane prepares you for backcountry work on an incline. But we would be doing all our hunting (for an animal called a Chamois, more on them below) around the 1500—1800m mark, so altitude wouldn’t likely have much of an effect. I just had to be prepared to put in some good hard work. Anyway, Dad was 65, and although he can go all day he doesn’t move at pace, so if worst came to worst, me and him could do our hunting at a more leisurely speed.

For Dan, it was a return trip to the area after he and our cousin, Aaron, walked in the year before. They had put in a massive effort, braving a river crossing in the dark and then hiking to a Biv near the tops—arriving at around 2am. Upon waking the next morning Dan, still wrapped in his sleeping bag, went to sit on the Biv’s porch and do some glassing. He quickly spotted a good Chamy buck up the valley, which was accosting a younger buck. It had the young buck cornered, pressed into some rocks, and was ramming his horns down on it in what appeared to be a pretty vicious attack. He quickly got his rifle and shot the older Buck, right from the porch. He was a healthy 9 Inches. Not a bad start to the trip!

After a few difficult stalks on some other tricky bucks, Aaron soon joined Dan on the board, shooting a nice 9 ½ inch Buck himself. Animal numbers in the area did seem to be quite low, but there appeared to be a few good bucks around, which is why we returned this year.

Funnily enough, while Dan and Aaron were there the year before, shooting their two bucks, Me and Dad were not far to the West, on the Brunner Range. We were having a terrible time of it with poor weather and clag. We got one good hunt on the first afternoon, seeing a few chamois (one of which had only one horn), a couple of pigs which were absolutely tearing the place up with their rooting (and one of which I shot), and plenty of goats and deer. And then it clagged in for pretty much the entire week.

We had had multiple false alarms throughout the week, with the clag teasing us and appearing to be about to break. Dad and I would gear-up and race up to the peaks only to have it close in and start pouring for the day. So we spent most of the week just hanging out with the friendly local Weka, and the Tomtit pair who were caring for their nestlings in the woodshed. I would sit motionless in the woodshed, watching the tomtit parents fly in with their mouths stuffed with insects to feed their nestlings. Immediately after being fed, the nestlings would flip rear-end up, and excrete a tidy little fecal sac, which is exactly what it sounds like. Tomtit nestlings, along with many of the other Passerines, defecate in these sacs which encapsulate their waste within a mucous membrane, and which the parents scoop up and fly away to, I guess, deposit in some tiny landfill somewhere. This helps keep the nest clean and hygienic for the birds, as well as preventing a build-up of wastes that produce strong chemical cues which predators and parasites can pick up on.

After an incredibly frustrating week, on the last day the clag finally broke, but Dad was feeling cynical and assumed it would only clag in again, as it had every other time. So I went out on my own to try to salvage the trip and get my first ever Chamy at the last minute. The chopper pilot had said he couldn’t come and get us until 6pm, which would give me heaps of time for a hunt if the weather played along.

I quickly spotted a Chamy across the valley, sitting on the edge of a scree slip. I had to go after him. The problem was, I would have to stalk in on him mostly right out in the open, and Chamy have famously good eyesight. He appeared to spot me instantly, from about 400 meters away. I could see him staring across the valley at me, and he started to move off. I ducked back over the ridge and circled around closer, before sneaking back over the ridge again, from behind some rocky ledges. I couldn’t see him anymore, but I guess he spotted me because he started whistling at me, which in turn helped me spot him camouflaged among some rocks and scree. I was slightly disappointed to see that it was the unicorn Buck we had spotted on the first day, so I didn’t spend too much time appraising his size, though I could tell he looked decent. I shot him from about 200 meters.

Just as I got over to him, the pilot text me and said the plan’s changed, and he was on his way. I panicked; it’s not a long flight time! I didn’t even measure or photograph the unicorn Buck, I just processed him in a mad rush. I had to smash out a hefty climb, and then run all the way around the ridge tops back to our pickup point. I literally arrived at the same time as the chopper, completely exhausted. Luckily Dad had packed the last of my stuff and had it all ready to go. When we got back to civilization we measured the Buck’s single horn, it was 9 ¾ inches with a great hook! If only the horn rot hadn’t taken his other one!

Anyway, this year the four of us got dropped at one of the most beautiful camping spots ever, and were treated daily to an amazing view over the Raglan Range, with the Inland Kaikoura Mountains rising in the distance on one side, and the snowy Spenser Mountains on the other.

We pitched our tents beside a cute little tarn and spent our evenings listening to the Brown tree frogs singing in the tussock. Dan managed to catch one, and we all marveled at the tiny frogs’ ability to survive in such a harsh alpine environment. The Brown tree frog—which is an introduced frog from Australia—is ‘freeze tolerant’ but not ‘freeze avoidant’, which means it essentially freezes solid on cold days during the winter. A study on the cold tolerance and overwintering habits of the frog, found that it can survive being at -1 degree in the right microhabitat for over 12 hours and can tolerate the freezing of around 50% of its body water content (maybe more if frozen slowly). I, on the other hand, having recently returned from the 30-degree Perth weather, was struggling with the cool late-spring evenings!

However, the days were long and uncharacteristically hot, and this seemed to have pushed the Chamois into ever smaller pockets of shade, or down below the bush line. We ended up having to range further and further to find them, and we spent 15 hours a day on the hoof. We saw some reasonable animals but, being relatively new Chamy hunters, we were struggling to properly gauge their size through the spotter, and perhaps we left a few animals that were actually good enough to take.1

But I was just happy to be out there. The trip was exactly what I needed after months in the city. Everything captured my attention; the lemon-coloured alpine buttercup and the rockets of the Spaniard Speargrass looked incredible sprinkled across the hillsides. The tiny bulbous Pen wiper plants, growing out of sheer scree, were beginning to flower and gave off an incredibly sweet scent, surprisingly strong from such small plants. Every step stirred up showers of multicolored alpine crickets, and they sprang all around us with tiny ticking sounds. The coral-like Vegetable Sheep stood out on the rocky razorbacks like colonies of some strange alien fungus (though it’s a shrub not a fungus. Apparently it was named for its sheep-like appearance from a distance; sheep farmers and their dogs would be confused by them while mustering, apparently thinking they were particularly brave or stubborn sheep trying to hide in the grass).

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The Chamois: An introduction

If you aren’t familiar with the Chamois, I’ll give you a quick rundown. The chamois are a species of goat-antelope from Europe. They can be found in basically all the mountain ranges there: the Pyrenees, the Alps, the Carpathians, the Caucasus, etc. They are a small animal. The males are called bucks, the females, does, and the young are kids.

In 1907 the Austrian Emperor, Franz Joseph (after whom one of our most famous glaciers is named) traded two bucks and six does for samples of various New Zealand plants, birds, and lizards. These Chamois were released around Mount Cook, and quickly spread in range to now call home almost the entire South Island alpine environment. Being an introduced species with no natural predators in New Zealand, their numbers can explode to unhealthy numbers, thus there are no seasons or bag-limits for hunting chamois.

While the quality of their meat is debated, I find it to be of fine quality—a cross between a deer and a goat.2 But they are highly prized for their trophies, being one of the most unique game animals in new Zealand. Their value as a trophy comes in part from their aesthetic and exotic-ness, but also from their difficulty in hunting. They can occupy famously precarious and dangerous sections of the alpine environment, often preferring environments bordered by slippery scree slopes, bluffy, rocky ledges, and cliffs. They also have famously good eyesight, as well as the typical advanced sense of smell of the other game animals.

The best hunting strategy for chamois typically involves circling behind and climbing down from above them, descending to within shooting range, as the the Chamois always set up in positions with good downhill views, having occupied the higher positions in their natural habitat and thus typically being approached by predators from below. This usually involves steep climbs, hard shooting angles, and often difficult and dangerous animal recoveries. Many a chamy hunter has found himself stuck on some bluff or rocky ledge with a nervous sense that they may have ended up in a spot they can’t get back out of. Meanwhile chamois can be seen sidling and climbing cliffs in a manner which seems to defy all the laws of physics (almost like the famous ibex’s climbing skills).

On the second to last day, Dan, Reon, and I left Dad alone at camp for the evening to nurse his feet and recover. We skirted around the head of a huge valley and descended to a lookout from which we had seen a few Chamy over the past few days. I quickly spotted one which looked okay, and Dan and Reon agreed. Reon was next up, so he and Dan stalked to within a few hundred yards, and Reon put the Buck down with a perfect shot from his 7mm Rem Mag.

Suddenly there were other Chamy springing up out of the bush around Reon’s downed buck, so me and Dan stalked in closer to see if we could find them, but they vanished seemingly into thin air. We sidled over to Reon’s buck and measured him: he was a hair below 9 inches, but a really nice buck. We radioed Reon and told him that we must have somehow made a balls-up, and that he’d shot an average doe. He was incredulous, and upon arrival he was relieved to confirm our trickery. It was only his second Chamy, his first being a much smaller animal, so he was stoked with his Buck.

The rest of the trip passed with no animals shot, but plenty left to grow for next time! On the final evening we were visited by a lone Kea who spotted us from overhead and swooped in to check us out. It was my first encounter with Kea and was an experience I had desperately hoped I would be treated to on this trip, which just kept on delivering!

Upon exiting the hills we drove to Blenheim and spent a quiet evening at the great Dodson Street Beer Garden, nursing our tired bodies and enjoying a cold beer and a burger. As I’m forced to spend more and more time outside of NZ I become ever more aware of how lucky we are to live here, and to have an absolute outdoorsman’s paradise right on our doorstep. I had only been back for a week, and what a welcome home I was treated to!

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Sprinkled along the shores and slips above certain rivers in the central North Island of New Zealand you can find, in discrete little pockets, feral Merino sheep. One of the rarer game animals in New Zealand, these sheep are the remnants of herds which were farmed in a free-range manner in the 1800’s and allowed to graze right up onto the open alpine tops. Once farming became more disciplined in the early 1900’s, most of these sheep were mustered back into properly fenced stations.

However, the wiliest of these sheep were left behind, and these formed small flocks which have sustained themselves to this day (their populations were likely supplemented in early 20th century when many farms were abandoned during the depression). They now haunt the shores, forests, and scrubland in small, secretive groups. They traverse scree slips and rocky bluffs above river gorges; the kind of country which would make a Chamois dizzy.

I had no idea about any of this until my older brother, Dan, got the opportunity to do some work on a Station that had a small herd of these wild Merino roaming its farthest reaches. He got permission to hunt them while he was there and shot a big, beautiful ram and a few ewes.

As soon as I saw his ram–and even more so once I tasted some of the meat he shared with me–I was obsessed. Not only is lamb and mutton some of my favourite meat, but his big ram called to mind the mystical game sheep of the Americas—like Dall’s sheep or the Bighorn sheep. I not only wanted to get a big old ram, but a supply of wild lamb and mutton would be a great addition to my primarily wild-game diet. I had been living purely on wild venison for a few years at this point, and was getting a little bored of it.

I knew it might be a big ask, as their numbers are quite low (especially on public land), and they can be surprisingly hard to hunt. As Jack O’Connor, America’s greatest wild sheep hunter, said “A deer that has been shot at will go around the side of a hill and lie down… A ram will leave the country”.

The problem was, Dan’s private land hunt was likely a one-time thing (or at least we didn’t want to be greedy and ask for access again so soon) so we set about researching where we might find some sheep on public land. Dan already had some idea where they were located, and with his knowledge and my research we came up with a plan, and thus we found ourselves heading into public land on a scorcher of a day in early Jan.

I had stupidly decided to buy a new pair of boots the day before our hunt, and to break them in on the hill. They were a style of boot I don’t typically wear, and within the first hour I could feel blisters growing on both heels. The journey in to the area only took around three hours, but it required some miles and a considerable descent, which did destroyed our quads (we had heavy packs!).

As we meandered along the final flat towards camp on shaky legs, we spooked two sheep from under a small terrace in the bush, not 50 metres from where we would be sleeping!

We dropped our packs in camp and pursued the fleeing sheep, but within half an hour we found ourselves corralled by the unbelievably dense and frustrating bush, pushed out onto a bluff above the river. Having made an absolute racket of swearing and bush-bashing, we gave up and returned to camp.

That evening saw us ascended a short but very steep 300 metres to a lookout we had discovered on the edge of a moderately sized rocky slip, which had a good amount of summer feed on it. At this point my heels felt like they had worn to the bone in my new boots, and it was only the first day. Though we watched the slip above which we sat, mostly our attention was drawn across the valley to a giant face which had multiple scree chutes and scrubby spurs broken by patches of bush, bluffs, and rocky outcroppings. There we saw quite a few sheep, including three mature rams.

The face that held the rams was so steep, and was composed of so many shutes, slips, folds, spurs, and little bluffs that we were unsure how exactly we were supposed to hunt it. Not to mention we were both already incredibly sore and my blisters were beginning to pose a real problem when it came to climbing. On such unsteady legs, climbing the opposite face could easily end in disaster.

As we sat and talked about how we might hunt that face over the next few days, we heard a quiet bleat not far off, and within half an hour a ewe and a lamb poked out onto a spur not 100 yards below us. It being our first day, we decided not to shoot them–the meat would not keep well in the heat, and we wanted to get more of an idea of what the area was like in terms of animal numbers, both deer and sheep.

The next few days passed in much the same manner. We would climb to the lookout, me on raw heels taped with electrical tape (yes, I forgot to bring good plasters), we would see the rams (and a few red stags) on the far side–in a new spot each time–and we would have a few ewes and lambs coming out around us, almost always within 100 yards.

Our game plan was to wait and hope a ram came out on our side, and if we had no luck, to shoot a couple of ewes and lambs on the last day. Unfortunately for us, no rams appeared, and on the last day we saw no sheep! So, we were faced with a considerable hike home with empty–but still heavy–packs. We weren’t too phased, it was mostly a reconnaissance trip anyway, and we knew that hunting a new spot and trying to find and learn about new animals often requires a few “unsuccessful” trips. Mostly we were just super excited to have seen a good number of animals.

Dan wasn’t available for any hunting for a while, but I was determined to get a ram, or at least a lamb, hogget, or something! So I returned with a new crew, my other older brother, Reon, and a friend of mine, Ride.

The trip felt cursed from the beginning. The weather was much worse than forecasted. It poured with rain and the river was swollen—not ideal for crossing—and travelling downriver would be difficult. Also, the Westerly wind was hammering our little lookout, which was supposed to be our main hunting base for the trip. Overall, it sucked. We were alternatively hot, cold, soaking wet, and constantly being whipped in the face and eyes by wind-blown dust and rocks.

So we spent most of our time stalking in the bush instead. Reon and I ran into three sheep heading towards us on a game trail not 100 meters from camp. It was a comical scene; the confused sheep and I locked eyes, equally surprised to see each other, maybe only 40 yards separating us. My rifle wasn’t even loaded yet, we had barely left camp. I slowly loaded and raised my rifle, but the sheep were in a gaggle, and I didn’t want my bullet to pass through the first sheep and wound the one behind it, so I had to wait. Just as they were about to bolt Reon bleated at them in an attempt to try to pique their curiosity, but it only reassured the sheep that we weren’t to be trusted. They bolted.

One morning before sunrise, Ride took the toilet shovel and went to take care of business. As he set to digging his hole, he spooked a nearby sheep from its bed and it ran up into camp, right past me and Reon enjoying our morning coffee.

Turned out, the only fine night to be had up at our lookout was the last night of the trip. It was all riding on this hunt. As we climbed the rocky face to our pozzy, we heard an alerted lamb in the bush bordering our slip, bleating for its mother.

In my head I heard the Mexican Captain from Blood Meridian: “When the lambs is lost in the mountains, they is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.” I readied myself to be the wolf today, a conflicting proposition for an animal lover like myself. I really didn’t want to shoot a cute lamb. It continued to cry for a while but soon went silent, and they never showed. That might have been our last chance for some wild sheep.

Regardless, we settled in for an evening of glassing. Reon faced down and across our slip–the direction from which all the sheep had approached–and I decided to face backwards for a while so my face was out of the scorching sun, and I watched the very top of the slip, over his shoulder.

After an hour, out of the corner of my eye I saw a slow flash of white. It looked like something slowly swinging its head, looking from left to right in a cautious scanning motion. It vanished again.

I said “Reon don’t move. I think there’s a sheep up behind you”. I saw another flash and knew it was a sheep. Reon turned and got a glimpse of it in his binos, too. Each of us was now prickling with cautious excitement. The animal was now travelling downhill, following the bush edge we were sitting on; it was coming directly for us! I told Reon, “just shoot it, even if it’s a ram, you just shoot it, you’re all set up”. I didn’t want to go home empty handed again, and getting meat is priority over a personal desire for a trophy for memorabilia.

Right then it walked between two trees, and we got a clearer view of it—a ram, a big one! Reon (who wasn’t particularly attracted to the sheep as a game species) backed off his rifle, gesturing at me and saying “na bro, you wanted a ram, it hasn’t seen us, you shoot it!”. We switched places and I got behind his rifle. The ram stepped out from behind the final few trees and into the open. Not 50 yards from us, he looked huge, both in body and horn. He was a beautiful sight. As he paused to graze for a second, I shot him in the hilar region, and he dropped instantly, rolling off the edge and down onto the scree slip. He tumbled for a bit, but got caught against a small rocky outcrop with some kanuka scrub on it. I could tell by the way he fell that the shot had knocked him unconscious instantly, and he died in seconds, essentially unaware of his own demise.

It’s a strange feeling. After days tip-toeing around the mountains, speaking mainly in hushed tones, to fire a rifle feels sacrilegious. The boom of the rifle rolls up and down the valley and it makes you cringe. It’s almost as if to finally reveal your location to the ecosystem in this way is to wake something huge which, until now, hadn’t known you were there. It feels like the whole world has suddenly turned its eyes on you.

So there is always a moment of pause, the rifle cracks, the animal falls, you watch and wait. Nothing happens. And then a wave of relief rushes over you. The animal is not wounded—it died quickly. All your hard work, discomfort, blood, and sweat has paid off. You and your family will have healthy, free-range meat for weeks.

But you have killed something. Likely the only other creatures to exist in all the known universe are here on this planet with us. Life is miraculous, and you have just ended one. It feels good to be successful, but also feels bad. But you know that, no matter what, for you to live is for other creatures, large and small, to die. The only choice you have is whether to take responsibility for that, or not. And it brings into sharp relief the fact that, one day soon, you too will die—and something will eat you.

I was shaky with adrenaline, and we all just stood and marveled at what had happened. If I hadn’t been facing backwards, looking up behind us, that ram would have walked right up behind us, given us all a fright, and most likely have gotten away. It was just pure luck that I happened to see him while he was still a ways out.

We scrambled over and down to him. It was even better than I hoped.

He was clearly an old ram, having lived a full life. He bore scars, old and new, across his face. An old battler, doing it hard in this rough country. He wore thick fleece only about his neck, shoulders, and back; he was strangely bare on his underside. His horns had nicks and notches taken out—from what, who knows.

Everyone I talked to said not to bother with ram meat. Apparently its tough and gamey, but I always take the meat. It’s the reason I hunt, even if I do occasionally specifically target a trophy animal for sentimental reasons. If his meat is tough, well, I guess I’ll have tough meat for a few meals—doesn’t bother me! Though he looked huge on the hoof he was surprisingly small bodied, especially once butchered. We took his two hind-quarters, a shoulder, and his back steaks–one shoulder and his heart was ruined by the bullet. Though I usually take them, I wouldn’t keep the liver or kidneys of such an old animal.

Interestingly, he had quite a few sheep Keds burrowing around in his wool. Keds are type of wingless fly, creepy little things which resemble a tick. They live on sheep and parasitize them, just like a tick. They don’t pose a risk to humans from what I understand, but they are quite off-putting, especially because you don’t often see such parasites on other game animals in New Zealand.

These wild sheep might just be my new favourite game animal, perhaps only because they are new to me. But there is something so unique about them. They were once semi-domesticated but free range, and they escaped re-imprisonment only by making their home in some seriously inhospitable spots and quickly turning wild. In the 100 or so years since they went rogue they have probably changed a lot, behaviorally and genetically, from their farmed ancestors—for example, in the fact that they now only seem to grow long thick wool on their backs, and have bare undersides.

So, after ten days in the mountains, I finally got my ram, and what a ram he is! Dan measured him, and he went for an unofficial Douglas score of 72. Dan’s private-land ram was about 74, so he has me beat there. When comparing our rams, you can clearly see the difference in quality of life between the public vs private land animals. My ram displays all the indicators of a brutal life, with scars on his face and big chunks taken out of his horns.

The great American sheep hunter Jack O’Connor wrote “The mountain sheep keeps his horns as long as he lives, and on them he writes his autobiography. He records his age, his species, his good years and his bad—and his battles”. And what a story this old Ram tells!

Follow up note: We ate the meat, and it was delicious. We roasted a hind-quarter the way you would roast a younger lamb’s leg, and honestly, I couldn’t tell the difference between it and normal mutton. It was tender and delicious. Further proof to support the suspicion I have that “gamey” meat is not real. Or, more specifically, that all meat, even farmed beef, is “gamey”, and that the gaminess ascribed to wild animals is more of a mental thing by people unaccustomed to the thought of wild game.

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There is a thought experiment known as the Ship of Theseus, which discusses an imaginary ship docked in a port which has, over time, had every single board, plank, sail, bolt, and nail replaced, such that not a single piece of the original ship remains. The thought experiment then asks, is this the same ship as the original, or an entirely new ship?

The more you think about it, and analogous examples, the more confusing it can become. And there are many differing opinions on this thought experiment.

A similar and simpler form of the thought experiment concerns a knife whose blade is first replaced, and then later the handle is also replaced, such that the knife now has a new handle and a new blade, with no remaining original part. Is this the same knife? I would argue that, no, it is an entirely different knife—what may be the same is my concept of the knife and its identity (“my knife”), which exists only in my mind.

A Fallacy of Continuity

I have long thought that the progressive left’s identarian claims of guilt and responsibility derive from a sort of fallacy of continuity which relates to this thought experiment.

Where the progressive left sees a label (e.g., “white men”, “the USA”, etc.) that has continuity through time, then they assume that the thing itself (and its current constituents) also has continuity—such that guilt and responsibility can be ascribed to all the constituents of that thing or group today despite none of them being a part of the original thing.

For example, you frequently see claims that the USA was “founded on white supremacy and racism” with the implication that the USA today is therefore white supremacist and racist. However, no one present at the founding of the USA is alive today, the government has changed multiple times at all levels, the racist laws have been revoked, every person has been replaced multiple times by new people. The major continuity between the USA of then and the USA of now, is the label “The USA” and the location of the thing bearing that name. Obviously there is more historical continuity between the two, but none really capable of universally transmitting guilt or responsibility onto those people who are currently a part of it.

The Left’s take on this mirrors the “Continued identity theory” take on the Ship of Theseus. This perspective would argue that because the USA wasn’t disestablished and replaced all at once, instead, people died and were replaced (or laws were altered) piecemeal and intermittently, therefore it is still the same thing (imagine a house that has its walls replaced today, floors tomorrow, roof the day after: most would think of this as the same house. But a house which is entirely deconstructed and rebuilt all at once is considered a new house. Again—the only real difference is the continuity of our concept of the house).

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If the knife mentioned previously was used in a murder, and then years later the blade was replaced, and then the handle too, would you submit that knife into evidence regarding the murder years before?

Or given that Volkswagen supplied the Nazis, would you admonish all of their staff today as Nazis, and would you make them personally apologize to Jewish people, and perhaps even pay some form of reparation? Given that the company has changed management, staff, policies, suppliers, and clients multiple times since then, few would argue that the Volkswagen of WWII is the same Volkswagen of now in any substantive manner capable of transmitting culpability to those working for Volkswagen today.

The Dual Fallacies of Continuity and Composition

The identitarian (woke) Left frequently leans on this fallacious thinking on the continuity of identity, along with the fallacy of composition (this is the fallacy that what is true of some part is therefore true of the whole, e.g., more white men than black men are rich, or most of the billionaires in the USA are white men, therefore ALL white men have privilege).

This leads the Left to villainize entire groups of people as privileged or racist despite them being poor and never having been a part of any kind of racism, simply because they fall under a category label that matches the category label of some former group of ‘privileged’ racists (fallacy of continuity), or because some tiny, current portion of their group is exceedingly successful (fallacy of composition).

This is why the Left will tell young white men who have never had any privilege, who are lower class and have never been racist, that it is their “turn” to accept some undesirable circumstance and to “step aside and let women/POC to have a go”. They literally view the young white men born 20 years ago as the same people as those white men who were alive 200 years ago simply because they bear the same label or identity-concept. Its a identity-continuity error and it arises from the Left’s obsession with identity labels. These labels have continuity, so the Left thinks there is a continuity of constituents, too, despite this not being the case.

To The Left: Say Goodbye to Men

The fallaciousness of this sort of reasoning is readily apparent to anyone who has been on the receiving end of such logic, and is the primary reason for the much discussed rightward turn among young men (and white men specifically) which recently exploded on my twitter feed:

The reason for this rightward turn among young men is that these fallacies of the Left are readily apparent to anyone to whom they are applied—its so easy to see the error from the inside.

And no one likes being held accountable for crimes they never committed.

Until the Left figures this out, they better get comfortable losing more and more white men, and men in general.

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For around five years, my brother Dan and our friend Matt had been trying to properly time the Sika roar (rutting period) around Boyd Hut in the Kaimanawa mountain range of New Zealand. Dan and Matt had been shifting their trip around each year: a week earlier this year, a week later the next—trying to time the roar, and to catch some exciting rutting behavior up close. However, no matter what, the mountains were eerily quiet and strangely absent of deer.

In 2021, their trip had to be brought forward to account for other life obligations, so they went in just over a month before the ‘typical’ roar dates.

What they found was a shock. Deer by the dozens were out on the scrubby faces and tussock flats surrounding the Ngaruroro river, feeding and sunning themselves, seemingly at all hours of the day. There were sika stags in mobs1, out in the sun late into the morning, fattening themselves up for the roar.

In a couple of weeks these stag mobs would break up, the stags would separate and retreat into the bush to strip the velvet off their antlers by rubbing and thrashing on trees, and they would also begin to round up their harems of females (female Sika are called hinds). Once the territories were marked, the velvet stripped, and the hinds corralled, the changing temperature and the shifting photoperiod of autumn’s onset would cause the females to cycle—and the roar would start. Every stag would be driven crazy by the pheromones filling the air, desperately trying to sire each one of his hinds while being vigilant, day and night, for the intrusion of other stags looking to pinch one of his ladies.

Dan and Matt decided that the yearly trip to Sika Country would now have to be a pre-roar trip, when the stags are still mobbed up but in hard velvet, and have not yet returned to the bush to carve out their separate territories.

Our quarry: Sika deer

The Sika are an East Asian deer, introduced to the central North Island in 1904, when 6 adults were donated to the NZ government by the Duke of Bedford. It’s claimed that we have two types—the Manchurian and the Japanese sika—but there has been over 100 years of interbreeding, and thus they are classified generically as Sika. They are smaller in size than the more numerous Red deer, and they only typically achieve an antler size of 8 points (though rarely they throw 10 or, even more rarely, up to 12).

Sika are incredibly aggressive during the roar and are said to bully the larger Red deer out of their territory so that, for the most part, Reds and Sika have separate distributions. Reds and Sika apparently have a love-hate relationship, however, as where the two populations do mingle they frequently interbreed, and populations of Sika-Red hybrids are often found.

My ill health, and panic attacks

In March of 2022, Dan and Matt invited me to join them on their yearly trip to the Kaimanawa mountains for some good old hunting and fishing.

The only problem was that, beginning 6 months or so previous, I had experienced my first ever period of ill-health, after a fortunate lifelong salubriousness. This scared the crap out of me, and I eventually developed severe health anxiety, thinking I was going to kick the bucket at any moment. I'll spare you the full story, but I spiraled, and it’s safe to say I was in very poor condition. Eventually my physical health issues resolved, but the anxiety remained—I had inadvertently developed an anxiety disorder.

I was left having multiple panic attacks a day. My body had started having full-blown, involuntary fight or flight responses to essentially nothing, and the racing heart that arises as part of those panic attacks caused me to develop a cardiophobia. What results is a horrible loop of panic attacks that trigger physical sensations which trigger further panic attacks. It becomes impossible to break the feedback loop, and any attempt to do so by actively trying to control your breath and heart rate only tends to exacerbate the sensations.

I had been seeing my doctor for help, tried some medications, but so far I was not improving at all.

For this reason, when Dan and Matt invited me on the trip, I was hesitant. I told Dan what was going on. It only made him more certain that I should join them. "We can take it easy—the country isn't too rough. It will be mostly chill days glassing for deer and catching trout" he told me, forgetting that I had been there before and knew all to well that “chill” isn’t a word I would use to describe much of that area (or any other New Zealand back country).

But at the urging of my doctor, I agreed to go.

First deer and the Hilar zone

So it was that I found myself a few weeks later, setting up camp in our pozzy just inside the bush line, overlooking the Ngaruroro River. I was feeling shaky and anxious. I knew if my health did go south fast, or I had a full blown panic attack and completely lost my marbles, I was essentially on my own. We were literally hundreds of kilometers from civilization.

But I was also excited to be there. It is always great returning to an old pozzy2, snooping around for any signs another hunting party had discovered your site. And then finding the goodies you stashed for yourself last time—the crusty old camp pan, half a bottle of Whiskey, a bottle of your favourite venison BBQ-rub. After setting up camp, we set off on our first evening hunt.

Dan and I headed up to his favourite lookout, and spent a quiet evening in the sun, glassing for deer and talking about life in whispers. About 45 minutes before sunset, we noticed a lone yearling3 emerge with a beautiful spotted coat, and Dan told me to take her.

In New Zealand, deer have no natural predators, and there are far too many of them, so there is no season or age limits on hunting them. We often shoot yearling hinds4 before they grow big and develop the voracious appetite that they turn on our defenseless native forest—and because they are the best eating.

We struggled to find a shooting post high enough to elevate my barrel above the beech trees and kanuka scrub, and in the process of messing around she caught on to us. She darted a few yards and then paused to look back and scan the scrubby face we were sitting on. She couldn't quite see us, but we could tell she was about to spook, so I ended up taking a bit of a snap-shot.

I struck it well, right in the hilar zone, and she dropped where she stood. A perfect shot to the hilar zone is not a heart shot, but a shot to what’s called the “junction box”. With a heart shot, the deer still tend to do have enough gas in the tank for what’s called a “dead run”. They don’t make it far, but they do have one last burst of energy and consciousness. With a perfect shot in the junction box, you hit the pulmonary arteries and the central nervous system all at once. The deer drop right where they stand. Aside from ensuring the deer die essentially instantly, a bonus of a good hilar shot is that it leaves the heart intact, which is good because it’s the most underrated piece of meat ever—an absolute delicacy. (For a better explanation of this “junction box” theory, see here, though of you’re squeamish, be warned there are a few anatomical pics down the page).

It was a frustrating push down through some dense Kanuka followed by a few tricky crevasse crossings; the streams which run down from the mountains and into the river have worn deep guts into the soft pumice terraces.

Because of the small size of Sika, it is often surprisingly hard to find them after having shot one—they simply vanish into the scrub. I have spent an entire afternoon searching a smallish area in which I saw the deer drop. I only found it after hours of searching, and I had walked right by it many times. We found this one soon enough however, and set to work skinning and butchering the beautiful little yearling. While I (and friends and family) have long since eaten the meat, her little spotty skin adorns my office room floor—I can see it now as I write this.

That night we sat around camp and told stories, reminisced about past trips together, talked about life, had a warming nip of whiskey, and discussed plans for the morning.

For the first time in 6 months I was feeling good, and it wasn’t from the whiskey. It was the smell of the beech forest, dry blood on my forearms, the sweat drying in my shirt, the fresh venison. It was being away from civilization and technology, on a goal-oriented task with a small tribe of friends, using ancient neural pathways and reward systems which atrophy in the course of post-modern life.

It was, specifically, getting out of my head, which was helping me. This entailed not trying to control my symptoms, but also only talking about them sparingly. With a few exceptional circumstances, you can’t really talk your way out of mental health issues—and sometimes, too much talking only entrenches it all in your head and actually makes you worse.

Stags in the fog

The next two mornings were ruined by fog and low visibility. We spotted a few deer heading into the bush just as the fog lifted at morning smoko5, but it was too late, and they vanished quickly. We caught a few trout during the day, and mostly just relaxed in camp.

On the third morning, again ruined by clag, Dan decided him and I should push through the fog down-river to a valley in which he previously had good success, and hope we can catch a straggler out when the fog lifts. “On the way, we might spook any deer that are out in the fog, but we don’t have much of a choice” he said.

So we set off through the fog, scrambled down the terrace and on to the river flats. We moved quietly down river, hugging the terraces for cover. Visibility was a little better down in the shadow of the terraces, and the fog was getting a little lighter.

Before we got even halfway to our pozzy, we spooked a mob of 6 or 7 stags. They were bedded down in the shelter of the terrace about 30 yards from us, and both us and the deer were caught completely off guard. They sprang up and bolted down river, running parallel with the terrace that we were following. I stood dumbstruck, watching the deer springing off through the tussock, thinking I'd never get a shot and that we'd bungled it. But Dan turned to me and hissed "let's go!" and took off after the deer.

We made no attempt to be sneaky or to stalk, it was an all-out run. I sprinted after Dan, my day bag slamming up and down on my back, making a hell of a racket. Years of watching deer from a distance and stalking them quietly made it feel so odd to be openly chasing them at close range, and I felt like it would have been more appropriate with a spear in my hand. I could see them bounding down the flats ahead of me. One of the stags had somehow lost an antler, bearing only a single four-point antler on one side.

The stags spotted an open spur that they could climb, so they turned hard left and shot up the terrace above us. This raised them up above the scrub and gave us a perfect line of sight. They were quick though, making it over the spur and out of sight in an instant, all except one, which had paused on a little knoll nearer the bottom of the spur - but he was about to vanish too. I dropped to a knee, actioned my rifle (no I was not running around with a loaded rifle), and shot the deer from about 70 yards. He went down instantly.

He was a beautiful 6 pointer, in hard velvet, and my first ever Sika stag. We were stoked, Dan was especially happy on my behalf. He told me to keep his antlers for memory’s sake. We would strip the velvet and coat the antlers with a little potassium permanganate, and they would look awesome. The antlers are a great memento of a meaningful hunt with my oldest brother, in the midst of one of the toughest times of my life. As we dressed the deer, we were blown away by his condition; he was carrying an inch-thick layer of fat on his brisket.

We had heart, eye-fillets (tenderloin), and trout for dinner that night. Afterwards we sat out on the terrace and had a mug of port while we looked over the valley, with the Ngaruroro River glowing in the moonlight. I wasn't immediately cured of my anxiety, obviously. But the trip did lead me to a realization, and in the following months I used hunting (solo and with company) as a sort of therapeutic treatment to build resilience. Hunting became the vital ingredient for improving and maintaining my mental health.

Back-Country Therapy: A difficult treatment paradigm

It was, however, a very difficult and stressful form off therapy. The wilderness is no Xanax.

As I said, I was having multiple vicious panic attacks a day. And I was failing at trying to talk, think, breathe, “mindfulness” my way through them. All of this stuff only turns your attention onto your symptoms and increases your pathological inward focus. I was at my limit.

After my trip with Dan and Matt, I realized the only way out was through. I needed to intentionally make my heart race, put myself under stress, and prove to myself and my limbic system that nothing bad was happening. I needed to build resilience and confidence again, and the only way to do that is to prove yourself to yourself.

So I would wake up at 4:00am, instantly in a state of high-anxiety, and drive into the mountains with my heart racing and my head spinning (a strange vertigo was one of my main symptoms). Driving alone into the mountains on a foggy morning isn’t very relaxing in this condition.

Sometimes I would have to pull over and throw up. Occasionally the anxiety would beat me—I would back down and go home, and this always just made the anxiety worse.

Then I would hike into the bush by torchlight, still nauseous and panicking.

I would arrive at my hunting spot—a valley I had been hunting for years—just in time for sunrise, and often find deer pretty quickly. And then a strange thing would happen. Almost as if a biological, predatory instinct took over me, my panic would subside (still there, but in the background), and I would be consumed by task of stalking the deer, placing my feet carefully, hearing every rustle and snap, smelling deer on the wind, keeping track of which way my own scent was blowing. (In the video below, at about 16 seconds you can hear the deer “bark” at me if you have the volume way up. There is no shooting or animal harm in the video).

After successfully taking a deer, the adrenaline of the hunt coupled with my anxiety would cause me to shake, and the anxiety would quickly return in force. But it was tempered by something.

The fact that my physical sensations and panic could be assuaged by a consuming task proved it wasn’t based in reality, and the fact that I had hiked into the mountains proved that my heart and body was fine, I wasn’t about to explode. So I would be able to focus long enough to field dress the deer, load up my pack, and start the hike home.

Avoidance, mindfulness, and talk-therapy had all only made my anxiety worse.6 But with each hunt, with each cold, dark hike into the mountains alone, and each hard journey back to my car with an entire red deer’s worth of meat on my back, my anxiety lessened—or, more specifically, my resilience and self-efficacy grew.

And now I can just enjoy these trips into the hills like I used to.

Here is a time-lapse of me and my old man on a fine morning, quartering a deer. Dad is about 65 in this video, still climbing mountains, harvesting and carrying deer.

An explanation? Evolutionary mismatch hypothesis

There is an increasingly popular idea among evolutionary psychologists called the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis. It posits that there is a mismatch between the ancestral environment in which humans evolved, and the modern environments in which most humans currently live. This mismatch can result in a range of diseases and disorders, both mental and physical.

Human biology and neuropsychology evolved as adaptations to specific environmental inputs which produce a suite of adaptive behavioural outputs. However, in modern societies either the inputs are no longer present, or if they are, the behavioural outputs are no longer adaptive. Research is beginning to focus on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis as an explanation for things like obesity and disordered eating, stomach ulcers, workplace dissatisfaction, and even depression and anxiety.

I think the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis may hold a clue as to why hunting was such a vital component to me in regaining my mental health. And it could explain why hunting is so meaningful and so vital to the wellbeing of those of us who love to hunt for our food.

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