8 ms·

We Are Experiencing Definitional Collapse

54 points by steelstraw 5y ago

smitty1e 5y ago
> Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper. Baptist here. Yeah, we're on the same course we ever were. If "Conservatives" have veered off, it's because they've more regard for the Gospel of Klaus Schwab than for the one pertaining to that one dude.
h2odragon 5y ago
Hokey old values like "respect your neighbors, and their right to be wrong" will still work. "Chaos is coming" hah! It's been here all along, you've just been lying to yourself about its distance from you.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  In moments of peace and plenty when your neighbor is largely right or wrong about matters of trivial import like which version of god to bow before and what sports team to root for it is easy to let your neighbor be wrong. When both have very strong opinions about matters of vital import both sides have strong motivation to mind their neighbors business. I think that is trivially justifiable on many issues.
hhs 5y ago
> Our moment is one in which anything is possible because nothing means anything. It would have been useful if the writer added more historical context to this. In 1946, for instance, Orwell raised some of these points in his essay, "Politics and the English Language" [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...
Apocryphon 5y ago
Truth be told this has been happening for several decades now: "The Age of iPod Politics" (2004) http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.html http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.h... > The great American pacifier is our love of stuff and our ability to fashion our own insular worlds through our staggering selection of things to buy (even if we can't actually afford an SUV). But consumer America is different from political America. In consumer America, diversity of preference is not just tolerated. It is mandatory. [...] You make your choices, and I make mine. Yours, of course, are wrong. But what do I care? > Patching together customized networks of pundits, political comics, online news feeds and talk shows, we can choose among universes in which the polls show a dead heat or a blowout, the National Guard memos are truthful or fraudulent, the economy is rebounding or relapsing. You can watch Fox News and see your surrogate reduce my surrogate to a sputtering fool. I can go to my favorite political sites and follow the blogrolls, link after link, discovering how vast is the universe of people who realize that I am entirely right about everything. This virtual self-gerrymandering promotes black-and-white thinking. [...] You know that my naive ideas will lead America to crumble like Rome, and I know that morons like you are going to get me killed by a dirty bomb, but we never need to actually say a cross word to each other. Or anything at all, for that matter. It's hard to say when it all started, and you could probably say it's been going on in this country since the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists (or the Tories vs. Patriots, even). But growing up extremely online during the War of Terror, none of this is different to me in kind, only quantity.
netsharc 5y ago
This article smells like cynicism pretending to be self-congratulating intelligence. Painting whole swathes of groups to be all the same ("Liberals cheer the FBI and CIA, call for limitless censorship, and insist on blind faith in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper.") and saying they should've been something else is... meh, stupidly reductionist.
- LeonB 5y ago
  Perfectly put. Without the reductionism the whole article falls apart.
  - lostmsu 5y ago
    Is not the point of the article that people tend to be extremely reductionisty though?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
civilized 5y ago
Oh, I don't know. Whatever the faults of $CURRENT_YEAR, it still compares favorably to that time when we randomly invaded a country because a two-pizza team in the White House thought it'd be awesome. And then we re-elected the guy who led the circus, because YEAH! WARTIME PRESIDENT! USA! USA! USA! We've always been tyrannized by a majority of unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters. This is why democracy sucks and has to be checked by an anti-majoritarian constitution that enshrines basic liberal values. It doesn't stop every horrible thing from happening, like the aforementioned stupid war, but it sure helps stop the worst stuff.
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters The Iraq war was authorized by Congress including most of the Democrats and The NY Times and other left media backed the war, at least at first. It’s sad to say that it was a bipartisan war albeit with a vocal minority who opposed it.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Yep. Everyone showed us who they really were during that time. We are a silly and foolish people. Blundering comes naturally to us.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
Animats 5y ago
It's kind of a weird rant, but a real problem. The divisive effect has been to weaken the US as a world power. Meanwhile, Russia's leadership apparently has just issued the orders to move on Ukraine.[1] Putin sees the US as weak and divided, and is taking the opportunity to restore the Russian Empire. (One step at a time. First South Osseta, then Crimea, then Donetsk. How big a bite this time?) [1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-intel/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-intel/index.html
- ncmncm 5y ago
  Weakening the US as a world power seems OK until you look at who is stepping up to take its place.
monkeydreams 5y ago
When people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure. The world is, as it always has been, tribal. The pressure to ensure that the out-group stays out and the in-group is protected is stronger than ever in the face of ever-present screaming voices from the out-group intruding on our lives. We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. And we feel pressured to protect even the most lunatic fringe of our own before we make common cause with the most sane voices 'on the other side' Trying to view the world through the lens of nominal logic will only drive you made with the inconsistencies.
- jansen555 5y ago
- nyokodo 5y ago
  > We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. By default yes, but we broadly overcome the default in many aspects of life so we should be collectively beating back political tribalism as much as possible. We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.
  - monkeydreams 5y ago
    > We’re not slaves to our basest instincts. Individually, yes, but only in a limited fashion. But with so many paths for tribalism, with each taking so much effort to bring under our conscious control, that the average person only seems to change the direction of their tribalism rather than bringing tribalism itself under control.
    - nyokodo 5y ago
      > in a limited fashion. With the proviso that everything human is subject to limitation, I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept. An only marginally curtailed tribalism doesn’t resemble English Common Law, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention etc, even in their imperfect implementations. We can do better and sure as heck don’t need to backslide.
dataangel 5y ago
TrispusAttucks 5y ago
It's Authoritarianism in disguise. Co-opt the symbols that are antithetical to your cause and turn them to your own. It's a tragic and pathetic point of human civilization. People gathering behind a symbol that historically represents the opposite of what they are fighting for whilst totally naive to the irony. Children who are adults but can't think for themselves like adults so they need a parental figure in the form of authoritarian institutions to tell them what to do because self reliance is just so scary. If they can't think for themselves how could anyone else in the country be mature enough to think for themselves. This will be contested but to blame the historic "left" and "right" as equally responsible for the erosion of sanity is dishonest. I've been "left" my whole life but this drastic transition to Authoritarianism is firmly the blame of the modern "left". I'm considering adjusting my party alliance in response to this new world order.
- MattRix 5y ago
  After the era of Trump and now this current era of book banning and preventing race-based topics in schools (among other things), I’m not sure how you can say the Authoritarianism comes from the left… unless you’re talking about temporary measures that were taken due to a global pandemic.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Wow, are we even experiencing the same world? Democrats are in favour of giving the government lockdown power because of a flu with sub 1% mortality rate, promote cancel culture, promote racial discrimination ("positive discrimination") and limits freedom of speech ("hate speech"). 20 years ago I was often debating against republicans who were against gay marriage and cannabis legalisation. Oh, how the tables have turned.
    - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
      I would say the Democrats were making it up if the USA were the only country experiencing this pandemic. Unfortunately, I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus and it would disappear two weeks after Biden was elected.
TehShrike 5y ago
You may be interested in "The Storm Before The Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond" by George Friedman. Published February 2020 (wow timing), he lays out a plausible-seeming decade based on historical patterns of culture in the US. You may not buy the premise, but it is still comforting to read someone predicting "don't worry, this only lasts about a decade" written right before everyone went crazy.
dluan 5y ago
lmao this is great. one thing ive always felt about moments of impossible to understand chaos and vertigo is that if want to find some sense of understanding, then look to the kids. for young people, all of the chaos is normalized. theyre not having to deal with foundation-shattering down-is-now-up redefinitions, "once in generation economic recession" every 10 years, etc etc. i mean they see all of the same noise, but i think theyre still very able to identify the signal and make sense of what is actually nonsense and what is meaningful. like, think back to when you were a kid when everyone was screaming that the sky was disintegrating in an ozone hole. and so if i look at the kids today, im reassured. theyre dealing with all of it much more amusingly than when millennials were kids (haha! anxiety is a tik tok dance! lo-fi mix to dissociate to), and theyre still doing stuff like unionizing their local starbucks, and actually reading bakunin and kropotkin.
furgooswft13 5y ago
At this point I agree with Hobbes; language is an impediment to understanding. https://i1.wp.com/footnotes2stories.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Calvin_verbing-words-4blog.jpg?resize=768%2C282&ssl=1 https://i1.wp.com/footnotes2stories.com/wp-content/uploads/2...

54 points by steelstraw 5y ago

> Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper. Baptist here. Yeah, we're on the same course we ever were. If "Conservatives" have veered off, it's because they've more regard for the Gospel of Klaus Schwab than for the one pertaining to that one dude.

h2odragon 5y ago

Hokey old values like "respect your neighbors, and their right to be wrong" will still work. "Chaos is coming" hah! It's been here all along, you've just been lying to yourself about its distance from you.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
michaelmrose 5y ago
In moments of peace and plenty when your neighbor is largely right or wrong about matters of trivial import like which version of god to bow before and what sports team to root for it is easy to let your neighbor be wrong. When both have very strong opinions about matters of vital import both sides have strong motivation to mind their neighbors business. I think that is trivially justifiable on many issues.

hhs 5y ago

> Our moment is one in which anything is possible because nothing means anything. It would have been useful if the writer added more historical context to this. In 1946, for instance, Orwell raised some of these points in his essay, "Politics and the English Language" [0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langu...

Apocryphon 5y ago

Truth be told this has been happening for several decades now: "The Age of iPod Politics" (2004) http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.html http://content.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,699790,00.h... > The great American pacifier is our love of stuff and our ability to fashion our own insular worlds through our staggering selection of things to buy (even if we can't actually afford an SUV). But consumer America is different from political America. In consumer America, diversity of preference is not just tolerated. It is mandatory. [...] You make your choices, and I make mine. Yours, of course, are wrong. But what do I care? > Patching together customized networks of pundits, political comics, online news feeds and talk shows, we can choose among universes in which the polls show a dead heat or a blowout, the National Guard memos are truthful or fraudulent, the economy is rebounding or relapsing. You can watch Fox News and see your surrogate reduce my surrogate to a sputtering fool. I can go to my favorite political sites and follow the blogrolls, link after link, discovering how vast is the universe of people who realize that I am entirely right about everything. This virtual self-gerrymandering promotes black-and-white thinking. [...] You know that my naive ideas will lead America to crumble like Rome, and I know that morons like you are going to get me killed by a dirty bomb, but we never need to actually say a cross word to each other. Or anything at all, for that matter. It's hard to say when it all started, and you could probably say it's been going on in this country since the Federalists vs. Anti-Federalists (or the Tories vs. Patriots, even). But growing up extremely online during the War of Terror, none of this is different to me in kind, only quantity.

netsharc 5y ago

This article smells like cynicism pretending to be self-congratulating intelligence. Painting whole swathes of groups to be all the same ("Liberals cheer the FBI and CIA, call for limitless censorship, and insist on blind faith in tech giants and pharmaceutical companies. Conservatives have cast off Christianity, their north star, the orienting principle of all they believed, discarding it offhandedly like a gum wrapper.") and saying they should've been something else is... meh, stupidly reductionist.

LeonB 5y ago
Perfectly put. Without the reductionism the whole article falls apart.
- lostmsu 5y ago
  Is not the point of the article that people tend to be extremely reductionisty though?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

civilized 5y ago

Oh, I don't know. Whatever the faults of $CURRENT_YEAR, it still compares favorably to that time when we randomly invaded a country because a two-pizza team in the White House thought it'd be awesome. And then we re-elected the guy who led the circus, because YEAH! WARTIME PRESIDENT! USA! USA! USA! We've always been tyrannized by a majority of unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters. This is why democracy sucks and has to be checked by an anti-majoritarian constitution that enshrines basic liberal values. It doesn't stop every horrible thing from happening, like the aforementioned stupid war, but it sure helps stop the worst stuff.

nyokodo 5y ago
> unprincipled, easily-duped, low-information voters The Iraq war was authorized by Congress including most of the Democrats and The NY Times and other left media backed the war, at least at first. It’s sad to say that it was a bipartisan war albeit with a vocal minority who opposed it.
- civilized 5y ago
  Yep. Everyone showed us who they really were during that time. We are a silly and foolish people. Blundering comes naturally to us.
- ncmncm 5y ago

Animats 5y ago

It's kind of a weird rant, but a real problem. The divisive effect has been to weaken the US as a world power. Meanwhile, Russia's leadership apparently has just issued the orders to move on Ukraine.[1] Putin sees the US as weak and divided, and is taking the opportunity to restore the Russian Empire. (One step at a time. First South Osseta, then Crimea, then Donetsk. How big a bite this time?) [1] https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-intel/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/20/politics/us-intel/index.html

ncmncm 5y ago
Weakening the US as a world power seems OK until you look at who is stepping up to take its place.

monkeydreams 5y ago

When people start claiming that we are experiencing 'a world gone mad' or 'group hysteria' or, as in this case, "Definitional Collapse", it makes me wonder if that person's context or worldview is one of those that is under pressure. The world is, as it always has been, tribal. The pressure to ensure that the out-group stays out and the in-group is protected is stronger than ever in the face of ever-present screaming voices from the out-group intruding on our lives. We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. And we feel pressured to protect even the most lunatic fringe of our own before we make common cause with the most sane voices 'on the other side' Trying to view the world through the lens of nominal logic will only drive you made with the inconsistencies.

jansen555 5y ago
nyokodo 5y ago
> We hold to tribes first, not beliefs. By default yes, but we broadly overcome the default in many aspects of life so we should be collectively beating back political tribalism as much as possible. We’re not slaves to our basest instincts.
- monkeydreams 5y ago
  > We’re not slaves to our basest instincts. Individually, yes, but only in a limited fashion. But with so many paths for tribalism, with each taking so much effort to bring under our conscious control, that the average person only seems to change the direction of their tribalism rather than bringing tribalism itself under control.
  - nyokodo 5y ago
    > in a limited fashion. With the proviso that everything human is subject to limitation, I don’t accept the same degree of determinism that you appear to accept. An only marginally curtailed tribalism doesn’t resemble English Common Law, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention etc, even in their imperfect implementations. We can do better and sure as heck don’t need to backslide.

dataangel 5y ago

TrispusAttucks 5y ago

It's Authoritarianism in disguise. Co-opt the symbols that are antithetical to your cause and turn them to your own. It's a tragic and pathetic point of human civilization. People gathering behind a symbol that historically represents the opposite of what they are fighting for whilst totally naive to the irony. Children who are adults but can't think for themselves like adults so they need a parental figure in the form of authoritarian institutions to tell them what to do because self reliance is just so scary. If they can't think for themselves how could anyone else in the country be mature enough to think for themselves. This will be contested but to blame the historic "left" and "right" as equally responsible for the erosion of sanity is dishonest. I've been "left" my whole life but this drastic transition to Authoritarianism is firmly the blame of the modern "left". I'm considering adjusting my party alliance in response to this new world order.

MattRix 5y ago
After the era of Trump and now this current era of book banning and preventing race-based topics in schools (among other things), I’m not sure how you can say the Authoritarianism comes from the left… unless you’re talking about temporary measures that were taken due to a global pandemic.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  Wow, are we even experiencing the same world? Democrats are in favour of giving the government lockdown power because of a flu with sub 1% mortality rate, promote cancel culture, promote racial discrimination ("positive discrimination") and limits freedom of speech ("hate speech"). 20 years ago I was often debating against republicans who were against gay marriage and cannabis legalisation. Oh, how the tables have turned.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I would say the Democrats were making it up if the USA were the only country experiencing this pandemic. Unfortunately, I think Trump was lying when he called it the Democrat hoax virus and it would disappear two weeks after Biden was elected.

TehShrike 5y ago

You may be interested in "The Storm Before The Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond" by George Friedman. Published February 2020 (wow timing), he lays out a plausible-seeming decade based on historical patterns of culture in the US. You may not buy the premise, but it is still comforting to read someone predicting "don't worry, this only lasts about a decade" written right before everyone went crazy.

dluan 5y ago

lmao this is great. one thing ive always felt about moments of impossible to understand chaos and vertigo is that if want to find some sense of understanding, then look to the kids. for young people, all of the chaos is normalized. theyre not having to deal with foundation-shattering down-is-now-up redefinitions, "once in generation economic recession" every 10 years, etc etc. i mean they see all of the same noise, but i think theyre still very able to identify the signal and make sense of what is actually nonsense and what is meaningful. like, think back to when you were a kid when everyone was screaming that the sky was disintegrating in an ozone hole. and so if i look at the kids today, im reassured. theyre dealing with all of it much more amusingly than when millennials were kids (haha! anxiety is a tik tok dance! lo-fi mix to dissociate to), and theyre still doing stuff like unionizing their local starbucks, and actually reading bakunin and kropotkin.

furgooswft13 5y ago

At this point I agree with Hobbes; language is an impediment to understanding. https://i1.wp.com/footnotes2stories.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Calvin_verbing-words-4blog.jpg?resize=768%2C282&ssl=1 https://i1.wp.com/footnotes2stories.com/wp-content/uploads/2...