vague notes on things going poorly march 2025
A thing I struggle with: between relatively competent people whose objective it is to do something interesting
and maybe garden or see a football match on the weekend and relatively competent people whose objective it is to
hoard capital and power, the latter group will obviously end up with more capital and power. Moreover that group
typically doesn’t want to use that power in a way that would optimize human well-being or long-term sustainability,
however one would define those. (Yes, it’s an oversimplification, but I think the broad strokes gesture at a real thing.)
I’m not convinced Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel are happier than me, but they sure as hell have more of an influence on
public policy. The US has historically been a fertile ground for the rise to prominence of the second group of people
by encouraging a mindset where the venture capitalist class is seen as the best and the brightest, the visionary
builders of the future {I’ve met some; no they’re not}, and furthermore the implicit (or sometimes explicit —
god these people are unimaginative!) assumption that the more money you manage to make, the better you are at life.
To some extent, in the US social space anyway, there simultaneously seems to be a successful reframing of caring about
the degradation of the US institutions and civil liberties as something cringe-worthy for crying liberals who are mostly
interested in signalling their “superior” politics. I can understand a frustration with a tendency of certain groups
signalling their superior politics. (Shoutout to the editor-in-chief of Czechia’s most prominent intellectual
weekly, who somehow managed to call Trump a “capitalist communist” in a truly remarkable application of algebraic
transitive relations. Trump bad, communists bad, ∴ … A second shoutout to Czechia’s loudest Data Scientist,
who decided to inform us all that the true reason for whatever is going on in the States is Bernie Sanders, or something.)
I understand the compulsion to make fun of those people. It’s a trap, though. Once you’ve owned the libs, what’s next?
A friend says that the left, however that’s defined, has insufficient swag. He’s right, no one wants to be scolded,
and that’s probably something to bear in mind, but it is not by itself a positive vision of the future. Meanwhile,
everyone is busy trying to survive, and many, if not most, people are contending one or more unspoken but intractable
personal griefs and struggles. So the question of “which things to do and why” is typically fairly radically
constrained by things like “I need to pay for food and housing”, or “a family member that I am responsible for is sick”.
Nevertheless it’s an important question to ask, and I don’t know the answer.
One thing that seems useful is to periodically articulate, even just to myself, what exactly is going wrong and why I think it’s a bad thing.
(That’s not really what I’m doing here, but it’s helpful to know the views I take for granted that aren’t universally held.
I had thought dismantling Social Security and decades-long climate time-series was self-evidently bad,
but there’s lots of very credentialed people who will tell you otherwise, mostly by yelling some combination of
EFFICIENCY, AGI, and PODCAST.) Fairly regularly these days, because I am (nominally) a constituent of a powerful government,
I write my elected representatives about various issues. (Sometimes I use ChatGPT, since the main point is that many
representatives use the number of letters they get on a certain topic as a mandate, but I realize the vague despair
inherent in sending robot-written email for other robots to read.) There are plenty of lawyers and journalists to donate to —
that’s probably more useful than robot email. There are times when it’s good to be a body in a crowd.
(There are even times where being a body in a crowd may change who is in the government!)
These things all make some sense to do, but they are also laughably insufficient.
Simultaneously it’s tiresome (& counterproductive) to scold or virtue-signal — no one wants to join a miserable, virtuous left.
So there’s a constant balance to be struck between not looking away and not being miserable and in general managing,
because personal agency feels limited. My partner is extremely post-Soviet, with a very specific type of pragmatism
that comes with that, so we simultaneously bike to work and get the little community vegetable box and do our little
local things & also have iodine a cube of emergency water in the bathtub in case of nuclear incident (this is less irrational
than it sounds — we live 6 kilometres from a submarine base).
It feels like an impasse. It is. (It’s very possible things will get worse and this calculus will change radically soon,
of course, but that’s not a bridge to cross right now.) If you have any thoughts about any of it, I would love to hear them.