On Politics, Marxism, Feminism, and Young People Being Bad at Thinking
Politics, especially power/oppressor politics, can never be a north star for a society because it's subjective from all angles and is ultimately a bad framework.
Politics, especially power/oppressor politics, can never be a north star for a society because it's subjective from all angles
Ex:
Women (marginalized) enter the sphere of men (power) = good
Men who become women (marginalized) enter the sphere of women (power?) = not good?
I tweeted this while reading War and Peace, and now that I’m reading Crime and Punishment, I have to expand on it.
In War and Peace, Tolstoy observes that we are always bound to look back at our ancestors’ action and scoff. We judge our predecessor’s without context. Dostoevsky goes a step further and literally says, of the communists, that they try to erase the most fundamental beliefs in favor of justice. He says that in this communist (he calls it communal) ideology, to treat women differently than men is regressive, and that chivalry is sexist. He even jokes that one day men will fight against women in sport and we will call it progress.
Keep in mind, these books were written just 50 years prior to Mr.Lenin’s Marxist Wild Ride. Ruh Roh Raggy.
Old People Suck At Thinking
In the now-famed book The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt does something bold. He calls out how bad humans are at changing our minds, and then he changes the mind of the reader.
To grossly oversimplify what the book is about, humans aren’t rational, they’re rationalizing. Basically we don’t think through things. We decide what we think instantly based on our biases, experiences, and pre-dispositions, and then we justify our decision to ourselves and others. We come up with our “why” post-hoc.
He goes on to say that based on how you “taste” the world, you will have different opinions on similar facts, and that much of how we taste the world is genetic (but also some of its not). Let’s use welfare, for example. If you’re a Democrat, you probably think it’s good, because your primary taste bud is helping people. If you’re a Republican, you probably care more about proportionality, so giving people money for nothing just don’t sit right with you.
Again, that’s a 2 paragraph summary of a 400 page book, but it’s a great, believable framework for understanding politics.
I’m going to go a step further.
Old people don’t get better at being rational, but because they have more data than young people, they default arrive at better conclusions, and generally don’t need to rationalize as much because their ideas naturally hold more water.
For example, when you’re 19, you decide you want to spend your money on cool stuff, and you rationalize it by thinking of how cool the stuff is gonna be.
When you’re 35, you are intimately aware of how cool stuff becomes uncool pretty quickly. You also have experienced emergencies, compound interest, bills, etc.. When you get your paycheck, your default decision is to use it wisely. You don’t even have to rationalize it, because at some point, you found a system that works, so you never think about the why ever again.
Young people are smart. They can rationalize anything. Old people are dumb. They rely on wisdom, not intelligence.
Obviously old people are also intelligent, but the need to rationalize fades as we gain experience in life.
The two can’t understand each other, because they rely on different frameworks. Old people primarily on wisdom, young people primarily on nothing and post-hoc rationalization. It’s why an old person telling a young person that drugs are bad (mmkay) only registers if the young person already believes that.
So what does this have to do with politics?
Young People Suck at Making Good Decisions
I’m going to immediately take us into a stupid, reckless line of questioning, so buckle up.
Should women have equal rights to men?
Both young and old people alike will agree on this. No.
Lol just kidding, yeah, women and men should have equal rights. Maybe you’re super progressive and you think men should have less rights; in that case, you’re gonna be super pissed at me in like 45 seconds.
Are men and women equal? It depends. There may be some disagreement here. On the one hand, men and women should be treated fairly, but are men and women equal? Again, it depends.
A young person might say yes. An old person will almost certainly say “in what context?” Men are better at some things, women are better at other things, and in different contexts, men or women will have an advantage or disadvantage that warrants different treatment.
A Terrible Thought Experiment in Men vs Women
Let’s take the economy. The economy naturally emerged out of a bunch of (mostly) men trading goods and services. Being a man, I can attest that men don’t just do this for fun. We want to make money because money is awesome. Why is it awesome? Well through all the fantasizing, and all the conversations I’ve had with my successful man friends, money is awesome because…um…wait what? Yes, buying bikes and guitars is awesome, but that answers feels like its missing something. A big something.
Oh, right. Money is awesome because girls like it.
Why do basketball players, action stars, and rock stars get girls? Is it because girls love basketball, action movies, and heavy metal? Mostly no. Well maybe yes to the third one—everyone loves heavy metal.
Girls like money.
I’m not literally saying girls like money. I’m saying if you’re a man who is at the top of some ladder, and you’re able to stay there (or climb higher), you’re in good shape with the ladies.
In boringer terms, a man’s ability to provide is his mate value, at least it’s a huge chunk of it.
So back to the economy, in a gross oversimplification, men compete to be the best at the economy so that they can get the best lady.
You might be saying “I like work” or “I love my job”. I do too, but I’m a believer that humans aren’t that interesting.
Work is fun when you accomplish hard tasks or get rewarded, and I pretty firmly believe those feel good because they contributes to you getting more money/status, making you more attractive.
In cooler terms, men’s first principle is to stack chedda.
Ok, so in my line of thinking that I think is pretty accurate, the economy is a game that emerged from a bunch of dudes doing shit to stack chedda to attract baddies.
Now what would you say about this: Should women be allowed to enter that game?
This game, played so men could compete, so that they can get women. Should women be allowed to play?
Well, yeah, I guess. Why not? Seems reasonable.
I’m not making a point yet, so don’t go scrolling up looking for one, and don’t go assuming I don’t think women should be allowed to play the game.
Feminism, as I understand it, was (hard to say if it still is) all about women getting equal treatment in society, and equal opportunity to play in the historically man game, and I don’t disagree with that.
What’s kinda weird, however, is that if you don’t believe men and women are exactly the same, it’d be kinda weird to expect that whole integration process to just work, yeah? Men playing the man game. Women (not men), playing the man game. You see how that could lead to at least a little confusion.
I’m not gonna go academic paper hunting right now, but it’s obvious it hasn’t been completely smooth.
On the men side, it’s hard to say if it’s been all cherries and pop. We’ve got like literally 10,000,000 incels, which I’d conjecture are men who are no longer competitive now that there are 2x as many people playing the game, and the women they’d historically go for are outcompeting them. That said, the top men still do okay. After 30, when women tend to spend time starting a family, men remain in their provider role, so they’re overrepresented in the workforce and with that, float to the top.
On the women side, we had #MeToo and boys clubs, which told me its not all cherries and pop for them either. We’ve had a lot of work put in to make it fair and safe, and now it’s looking like women make the same or more money (20-somethings do at least), get hired more, and do better by all measures during formal education, so that stuff seemed to work pretty well.
But those aren’t the same. Arguably fair, definitely not equal.
Takeaway here is men != women.
In a more hilarious-to-think-about vein, if men were to attend bunco night with their wives, I imagine things would end up…different, even if just a few dudes showed up.
What was historically a girls club, now full of boys. You think it’d be the same? Fat chance. Invite me to your bunco night, I want to see what happens.
So in summation, not saying women and men working together is bad, but applying a basic framework (the genders are equal) without thinking of context (men and women have different traits and goals) or second-order effects (this system will have to change to accommodate) is foolish.
I also still haven’t made my point. That’s what I’m doing now.
Why Young People Suck at Thinking
Coming back to my tweet, this is some of the rhetoric used by the TikTok politicians around feminism:
Women (marginalized) enter the sphere of men (power) = good
As we just discussed, this is cool. Groovy even. The power stuff is kinda weird, but the premise is fine. Probably gonna be a bumpy ride, as discussed above, but I think most, if not all, people are in favor.
Cool, cool.
This is some of the rhetoric used by the TikTok politicians around trans rights:
Men who become women (marginalized) enter the sphere of women (power?) = good
Wtf? Wait, are women marginalized or powerful? Which is it? And why is this different from women entering the sphere of men? And why are so many women against this?
Well, if you’re old, you know these two scenarios aren’t the same. You never even have to rationalize it because your snap judgement is where most people end up. If you tried to rationalize it, you’d probably say something about women’s safety, or that biological men and women are different, but what if you think men and women are mostly the same, and this is just an identity thing? Then those arguments don’t work.
Remember, we are not rational animals, we are rationalizing animals. So if you believe men and women are roughly the same, that’s going to be factored into your snap-judgement, which makes it totally reasonable to believe that trans women should be treated the same as women (because they’re basically the same).
There are a dozen reasons I can come up with for why trans women and women thing is a good idea, but like most things, its easy to tear down the status quo, but it’s really hard to build something up that even kinda works. Just because the status quo is fallible, doesn’t mean the status quo is automatically meritless.
Kanye West, Israel, and Palestine
We saw the same confusion with Israel, Palestine, and Kanye West, which is one hell of a sentence.
Kanye talked smack on his Jewish management team. The internet got up in arms about anti-semitism and condemned his action. Now, a year later, Israel is under a bunch of anti-semitic scrutiny from the internet for their response to an attack from Hamas.
Which is it? Are Jewish people the bad guys or the victims? Is there a stack rank for this? Can you be both at the same time?
Who are these great minds sifting through the nuance here? Or is it just a bunch of people jumping to conclusions using bad frameworks? I’m voting it’s #2.
The Reason for Young People’s Terrible Politics
So why do young people suck at thinking? Well, two reasons.
They can rationalize anything. and without experience to check their rationalizations, they don’t have a rubric. If they have conviction and a decent IQ, they have enough to go pretty far down any rabbit hole.
They have different facts. Up until like 20 years ago (full disclosure, that’s a random number), we all had the same facts. Maybe you got your news from Fox or NBC, but the two networks were ~generally~ reporting the same thing, just with different opinions of it. Now, not only has the news started reporting the same story differently, but with TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter, there are opinions being masqueraded as facts, straw-man arguments that hold no water, and definition creep (remember 5 years ago when racist meant something way different than it does today?).
So What Do We Do About It?
Idk man. You think I got answers? I’m literally a keyboard warrior. Well figuratively a warrior, literally a guy at a keyboard.
I wrote this because I’m in a transition phase. I spent my teens conservative, my early twenties liberal-ish, my mid-twenties confused and disillusioned, and now that I’m basically 30, I’m sitting in the middle italian handsing my way through the discourse.
I don’t know who to vote for, I don’t know where to even get news on who is doing what. Our president is asleep, our past president pissed off like 100,000,000 people (at least that’s what Twitter told me).
Politics is broken, and I’m blaming everybody else for it (I’m still young). Maybe it’s social media and clickbait news and too much information and different facts. Maybe young people are dumb. Maybe old people are dumb and young people are right.
I’ve stopped watching the news, rarely go on twitter, and stay the hell away from any short form video content and those steps seem to be helping.
As I get older, I spend a lot more time thinking about the things I experience or read, I exercise a ton of caution when I see new ideas, and apply a lot of scrutiny to attacks on old ideas.
Like my feminism argument, I think progress is generally very good, but blithely picking convenient frameworks to think through complex problems, while ignoring second-order effects and first principles (like stacking chedda for the baddies) terrifies me. We’re human first after all, and humans are basically monkeys with rationality, and monkeys are insane. We’re insane monkeys with rationality. Except for me, I’m totally sane.
Coming back to those old Russian authors. Men and women competing together in sports, judging our ancestors through the moral lens of today—these topics were being discussed 150 years ago! From those examples, you can tell that people have always been the same: we rationalize, especially when we don’t understand.
Rationalizing is dangerous.