Your point about citizen “self-help” is spot-on; sadly, government is often the greatest impediment to citizens helping fellow citizens. The most frustrating experience of my twenty + years in emergency management was the debilitating persistence of disaster mythology about citizen/survivor behavior. Allow me to explain — I think it reinforces your point.
Perhaps the two most pernicious myths center on the misplaced expectations of authorities, and on information sharing. First, authorities mistakenly expect chaos and antisocial behavior, which breeds mistrust of mass citizen activity. But citizens/survivors do not exhibit mythological disaster behaviors (e.g., panic or looting). Minor instances of scavenging or opportunistic theft draw disproportionate attention, when in fact the vast majority of citizens/survivors act rationally and altruistically, and accomplish much of their life-saving and care-giving while response institutions are still kick-starting their own efforts. Passivity is almost nonexistent. Massive citizen action – “the ‘mass assault' of collective response” always occurs in catastrophic disasters. In disaster after disaster, research and experience — worldwide — prove that the mass actions of citizens/survivors provide more initial sheltering, feeding, and relief, and save more lives, perform more rescues, and transport more injured than first responders. Second, authorities often limit information sharing due to mistaken beliefs of inciting panic. Detailed and specific information that helps citizens to make informed decisions does not cause panic as commonly thought by many authorities, while ambiguous information, intended to prevent panic, causes uncertainty and actually has the opposite effect. “Elite panic” is often common in the ranks of government; panic is a rarity in the citizenry.
Government authorities overlook or discount the mass actions of citizens/survivors because they envision them as passive recipients of services, not as autonomous actors. Official plans are blind to self-help. Although researchers recommend that plans be based on what people naturally tend to do in disasters, plans are chiefly developed with (government) partners and in the traditional way (based on the exercise of directive control by government institutions). They are based on unrealistic expectations about public behavior before and during a catastrophe. Planning that doesn’t anticipate citizens/survivors mass action only accounts for a fraction of a Nation's capacity and is deficient in adapting to emerging realities and lacks the agility to combine and leverage actions.
Spontaneous community organization is local in nature, and will have had little or no interaction with the formalized machinery of response. The majority of people will not have participated in government-encouraged pre-incident preparedness and planning (the government’s own surveys show the limits of stimulating pre-incident preparedness). And they will execute their actions without seeking direction from a centralized decision-making authority—yet are pursuing the same goals as emergency response and public safety (i.e., to stabilize the situation and provide immediate aid to their fellow citizens/survivors). (One of the finest examples of emergent response can be found in Michelle Sollicito’s “Snowed Out Atlanta: The Inside Story of the Fastest-growing Group in Facebook History.” It recounts her extraordinarily successful effort to mobilize a 50,000-strong emergent response group to bail out a city, county, and State’s faltering response to a severe ice/snow storm.) Mass citizens/survivors action like her’s is, in essence, a form of swarming. It attacks and blankets a problem (consequences) from many directions with speed, flexibility, and convergence. It is autonomous, opportunistic, exhibits self-organizing behavior, provides a form of integrated surveillance and situational awareness (e.g., citizen reporting), and can be quickly netted through social media networks (e.g., crowdsourcing). It relies on basic rules of operation, is fluid and shifting, has no centralized control, yet contributes to achieving the effects desired by the formal response structure (stabilizing the situation).
The failure of formal systems to respond effectively in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe is predictable. Directive control and centralized decision-making will falter. Conditions will deny or hinder organized access to the affected area for a protracted period. The scope of need will exceed the capacity of the traditional response framework and its institutions. Authorities will not have the means to intervene quickly, will not have sufficient resources to meet immediate demand, and will face extraordinary obstacles in delivering capabilities. Citizens/survivors are master improvisers by necessity, and their collective actions compensate in great part for the required startup time, and possible failures, of the formal response system. We need to rethink our networks, hierarchies, and complex rules and instructions that currently present impediments to cooperation. Preparation and improvisation must be synchronized.
It may be a forlorn hope, but it’s time to move from a government-centric approach to a hybrid that combines governments' capabilities with grassroots collective intelligence (e.g., citizen reporting) and collective action/response (e.g., crowdsourcing). The ability to quickly turn information and knowledge into mass action is increasing every day, and is the impetus for explicitly addressing the role of emergent response groups. How would we go about this transformation?
Government could identify physical, virtual and other enablers/force multipliers that can assist or augment citizens/survivors' mass response actions, and embed their use and provision in its capabilities and plans (e.g., the means to provide all-channels communication with swarming networks of citizens/survivors)
Government could commit to eliminating bottlenecks and impediments to cooperation between citizens/survivors groups and responders and response organizations.
Government could incorporate the contributions of citizens/survivors to stabilizing the situation in an agile planning system, which would contribute to superior shared situational awareness (e.g., real-time information sharing), self-organizing simultaneity, and the achievement of shared ends (e.g., stabilization of the situation and deliberate transition to formal, sustained disaster programs and services).
Government could establish the means to quickly support creative contributions that were not envisioned in pre-incident planning, to establish close cooperation between emergency services and citizens/survivors groups, and adopt a ‘disclosure imperative' by disclosing/sharing information, plans, objectives, goals and needs during the catastrophe so that government, nonprofit, and citizens/survivors collective actions can achieve shared ends (e.g., stabilize the situation).
Government could promote and adopt advances in information structuring and processing that support rapid disclosure and information sharing, including tools such as crowdsourcing to provide robust capability to assimilate the dense “tsunami” functional information (e.g., citizen reporting).
The government could identify stabilization criteria and share it widely.
The government could privilege heroic response actions of citizens/survivors over those of responders in word and deed and tell the story over and over again. Response professionals have adopted emergency response and public safety as a profession, whereas citizens/survivors accept danger and risk on the spot, and creative coping is their norm.
Finally, government could reignite the role of leadership in: - Inspiring individuals and groups to action - Identifying/indicating appropriate priorities and methods; setting priorities and sequencing actions that best support citizens/survivors mass response actions that contribute to incident stabilization - Clarifying purpose - Preserving faith and hope - Removing interference and impediments to cooperation - and encouraging solidarity and mutual respect. An Israeli Prime Minister once described unity and resilience with respect to sharing responsibility as “sixty percent my responsibility, and forty percent the public's”. I think the percentage skews heavily the other way, but it makes your and my points.
This may be the single most amazing comment I've ever gotten. Thank you sir, and, when I can figure out how, I shall link to your comment from the article body.
"Second, authorities often limit information sharing due to mistaken beliefs of inciting panic. Detailed and specific information that helps citizens to make informed decisions does not cause panic as commonly thought by many authorities, while ambiguous information, intended to prevent panic, causes uncertainty and actually has the opposite effect. “Elite panic” is often common in the ranks of government; panic is a rarity in the citizenry."
See COVID as a classic example of this. The authorities deliberately suppressed a ton of data that would have helped in all sorts of ways in part because they appear to have not wanted to trust their citizens to make "the right" choices
Well written and argued. Comports with much of my life experience living here in these united States and abroad. There are another three factors not mentioned here that are worth considering, IMO, for your thesis.
Even in places where it's tribal (like Afghanistan, where I lived for some 14 months), there are checks and balances on violence. Some tribes, like the Kuchi, are nomadic, while other tribes (Zadran) are settled farmers, and still other tribes (Mangal) are mountain people.
1. No one from any of those tribes would feel free to just go out and randomly attack another tribe's members without a very good justification and NOT just because of the possibility of reprisal, but because of what *their own tribe* and leaders might due to someone who initiated "unauthorized" violence that might bring reprisals onto innocent members of the tribe.
In other words, even in Hobbes' claimed "state of nature" where life really is nasty, brutish, and short, it's not *that* nasty.
2. There are frequently limitations on violence imposed by weather and geography. Afghanistan's mountains and winters basically shut down violence of any kind by October. Once the snows close the passes, everyone hunkers down and we'll pick up our feud in the Spring. Maybe...
3. Without government to direct large-scale economies, weapons and ammo are extremely limited, usually to small arms. It's hard to make "violence" on the kind of scale that wipes out entire villages or peoples without national economies that fund large standing armies people by people trained for killing directed by people willing to do so.
These kinds of inherent limitations on violence are ALWAYS ignored by Statists in justifying their claim for the absolute need of the biggest gang and cartel of all - government.
Rousseau and followers seem to have much in common with the cult of the child you discussed in your Frodo essay? I also thought of Lord of the Flies while reading this essay and I'd be interested to read it in consideration of your ideas. Thanks!
Also, thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't thought about it, but you're right, there is a weird kind of overlap between Rousseau and the Cult of the Child. Oddly, between Hobbes and the Cult of the Child, as well. Lord of the Flies author William Golding was...an interesting character, but oh boy could he write!
Another book which came out a year after Lord of the Flies, and was (I believe--though there is dispute on this matter) written in response to it is Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein.
The two books argue pointedly with one another on how such a scenario would unfold--each spinning a starkly different picture of the human animal. Golding's shipwrecked boys are Hobbesan, while Heinlein's are much more pragmatic and interested in building themselves a home.
About fifteen years after both books were written, the actual scenario played out--a group of preteen schoolboys got lost at sea and were shipwrecked. When they were rescued, rescuers described their camp as having sports equipment, well-ordered supplies, shelter buildings, signal fires, and showing all the signs of a healthy and growing society (except for women and children, as all the shipwrecked kids were boys). I detail this incident, and its bearing on the literary dispute between Heinlein and Golding (and other writers of shipwreck fiction) in my book The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile. You might dig :-)
Thanks for the recommendations. If you have a moment, can you expand on the Hobbes and culture of the child overlap? Im not well versed enough in either to see it clearly!
Victorians in general--not just Rousseaueans--were big cult-of-the-child people. Golding himself was a big devotee (and a bit of a pederast, which actually weirdly has a serious place in the cult of the child), but from the more conservative, Hobbesean end of the spectrum. At this end girls are seen in a rose-colored glasses fashion, as they "naturally" wish to avoid the horror of nature, where boys are seen as in need of "civilizing" as they are Hobbesean engines if let to run amok. Therefore, their innocence must be protected and reinforced, as their own impluses/sinful nature/etc. will otherwise lead them astray. By sheltering them, disciplining them, etc. you can preserve a boy's edenic innocence and form a righteous man out of him once he has the bad taste to enter puberty an start growing up.
(I know that there's a lot of sarcasm in that explanation--it's not directed at you. I am trying to articulate the genuine view as well as I can, but I find it so utterly risible and revolting that my attempts at paraphrase border on parody. Thank you for your understanding!)
Thanks for the in-depth reply. I imagine the book will speak to the "icky" feeling I get seeing toddlers and children in shirts with suggestive sayings like "ladies man"
to say nothing of the way children are being essentially exploited for instagrams likes (so you have both the poster, oftentimes I'm sad to say a mother, and the people who "like" it)
It may. It was written back in the 90s so Isn't that specific, but.
The thing that bugs me about the Insta likes and the cutsie transgressive T-shirts is on a different vector: they make it very clear that, for the parents, the child is a vanity project, rather than either a legacy project or (gasp!) a person. A cute kid isn't enough of an attention-getter, apparently.
I hate the child sacrifice angle of our culture. One you start seeing it, you notice how pervasive it is. The Cult if the Child is part of it, but it ain't the only part. Got a chapter on it in my forthcoming book The Art of Agency.
This is fascinating. The objectification of children, apart from the sexual, is chilling. When I was teaching I was shocked by the kinds of discourses around children, such as treating them as sources of data which was then turned into prescriptive, authoritarian diktats. Bureaucrats and careerists exploited kids for their own purposes with no remorse. In the name of "research" and "outcomes".
Agreed and looking forward to the book. It needs further "marinating" in my brain as you've described it elsewhere but there seems to be some level of death or aging anxiety at play. Though one might think you wouldn't want to be.... prematurely aging? your child if you're afraid of getting older unless in doing so you create in the child a "peer" (though of course their lack of agency makes them very much not a peer) while still allowing yourself to do all the "grown-ups" things you want to do.
All good points, though I can at least speak to the reasoning of some of the men who dress their children thus:
It attracts the attention of women.
In ascending order, women will hit on a man who otherwise doesn't look interesting if that man is: 1) wearing a wedding ring, 2) accompanied by an adorable animal, 3) accompanied by a baby, 4) accompanied by a baby wearing something super cute that makes people laugh.
I have a buddy who started pulling this shit when his son was born b/c his wife was very aloof and he was lonely.
This was fantastic. As a very small-time prepper living in a small/town rural community I have often reflected that the best thing to have in an actual disaster is good neighbors, and that to have good neighbors I should actively cultivate them by being one. This, of course, comports well with my Reformed Protestant worldview and mores. If, by God’s providence, I find myself in a terrible situation, what am I there for? Obviously to love my neighbor by helping.
Thank you also for supplying the real world examples, especially New Orleans/Katrina. The number of things the news media reported as fact that turned out to be false (during those days) was enough to convince me to turn off television news forever. I’m going to look for the documentary you cited.
If you were to look at this from a Law of Thermodynamics/entropy point of view, would the argument be that the energy/effort required to maintain order (in whatever sense that may be) is baked into humanity?
I'd say Dunbar's Number is less about the "default low-energy state", ie entropy, and more about conservation of energy.
Maintaining relationships takes energy. Facebook allows people to say they have up to 5,000 "friends", but nobody has even one-tenth that number - to spend even 5 minutes communicating with each person would add up to 42 hours a week, which is to say it'd be a full-time job. And not only would you not have close relationships with any of them, you'd annoy a few of them, too.
In practice, then, you'll choose a few people to spend several hours a week with (spouse, best friend, family), others several minutes a week (friends), and others a few minutes a week (acquaintances).
Interesting perspective from the beginning of the story to the Hobbes intervention. It is quite a lengthy piece deserving of a lengthy comment:
But realistically people do actually learn stuff. After experiencing both sides of being non-governed to being governed. The ultimate choice is to self-govern. That's supposed to be America. Today that choice is clearer. There's never been a better time in history for this moment. A truly self-governed Nation. The foreign ruling class and NGO's realize that too and it's just a matter of who wants it more. The deck is stacked in the foreign bankrolled USG's favor, unfortunately, because of the constant building up of weapons that were always acceptable to the people because of the false and constant fear of wars landing upon it's own shores, again. False protection mechanism that allows for the use of the people's own tax money to stockpile weapons that would be used on themselves by any form of government, in reality, if ever a threat to the bankrolled government for the acts of tyranny & treason were exposed.
We live and learn these things from the past and present. It's come full circle again and the world's bankrolled governments' and imperials are very aware of that too. Every 100 odd years the system comes full circle. The matter is that who is more prepared to lose control of the other.
During the American revolution the colonies had the advantage of distance from the British Imperial Troopers. When the Empire is built within the land; advantage Empire. It's plausible to believe that this strategy was planned all along, at this point in time. Needless to say, but if the bankrolled USG refuses to negotiate themselves out peacefully, through proclamation of Declorations of our Independence again. Many will decide to use force. They don't understand how the deck has already been stacked against this fruition. Many will decide to be the slave rather than the martyr as a matter of survival. The entertainment, political and corporate industries are a prime example and of course believe very selfishly in that philosophy. That which has been the historical human struggle whenever a group of bankrolled psychopaths have banned together and planted their ilk within a relatively peaceful situation. One only has to reference the recent history of America and realize that truth. America is basically trapped now and their bankrolled government has been compromised through fame, weakness, blackmail, bribery, and extortion - the basis and tools of the bankrolled communist regime.
If anyone is interested and can find the courage to get a version of: The Spectre of Communism. There is where they can realize what we're up against. The Communist Manifesto is another area that might be of interest as well.
Although America believes their own bankrolled government would be interested in the facts of the matter. The bankrolled communist regime is so vile, wicked, and power drugged that they will never stop the conquest to control and devour the world with bankrolled assistance until they are All put down like rabid dogs that they are. Knowing this as the bankrolled communist empire does; this revolution cannot be televised.
Find the most peaceful God if you haven't already.
Refusal to be enslaved by fake bankrollers and their slaves might be another opportunity to rid the world of the wicked and be on the final path to eternal freedom as well. Who wants it more?
So far we've seen that money in All it's forms creates the illusion of value and freedom or more precisely wealth. It's up to Humanity and those who know they are only human and recognizes eternal goodness which surrounds the darkness with all its beauty in light that decides their fate.
Wait. Am I still a subscriber? I have missed some posts. And, I have lost the emails I was using to read past articles. I will check my status, but I haven't been getting your emails. I only saw this because Holly cross-posted. Great article, BTW.
Your point about citizen “self-help” is spot-on; sadly, government is often the greatest impediment to citizens helping fellow citizens. The most frustrating experience of my twenty + years in emergency management was the debilitating persistence of disaster mythology about citizen/survivor behavior. Allow me to explain — I think it reinforces your point.
Perhaps the two most pernicious myths center on the misplaced expectations of authorities, and on information sharing. First, authorities mistakenly expect chaos and antisocial behavior, which breeds mistrust of mass citizen activity. But citizens/survivors do not exhibit mythological disaster behaviors (e.g., panic or looting). Minor instances of scavenging or opportunistic theft draw disproportionate attention, when in fact the vast majority of citizens/survivors act rationally and altruistically, and accomplish much of their life-saving and care-giving while response institutions are still kick-starting their own efforts. Passivity is almost nonexistent. Massive citizen action – “the ‘mass assault' of collective response” always occurs in catastrophic disasters. In disaster after disaster, research and experience — worldwide — prove that the mass actions of citizens/survivors provide more initial sheltering, feeding, and relief, and save more lives, perform more rescues, and transport more injured than first responders. Second, authorities often limit information sharing due to mistaken beliefs of inciting panic. Detailed and specific information that helps citizens to make informed decisions does not cause panic as commonly thought by many authorities, while ambiguous information, intended to prevent panic, causes uncertainty and actually has the opposite effect. “Elite panic” is often common in the ranks of government; panic is a rarity in the citizenry.
Government authorities overlook or discount the mass actions of citizens/survivors because they envision them as passive recipients of services, not as autonomous actors. Official plans are blind to self-help. Although researchers recommend that plans be based on what people naturally tend to do in disasters, plans are chiefly developed with (government) partners and in the traditional way (based on the exercise of directive control by government institutions). They are based on unrealistic expectations about public behavior before and during a catastrophe. Planning that doesn’t anticipate citizens/survivors mass action only accounts for a fraction of a Nation's capacity and is deficient in adapting to emerging realities and lacks the agility to combine and leverage actions.
Spontaneous community organization is local in nature, and will have had little or no interaction with the formalized machinery of response. The majority of people will not have participated in government-encouraged pre-incident preparedness and planning (the government’s own surveys show the limits of stimulating pre-incident preparedness). And they will execute their actions without seeking direction from a centralized decision-making authority—yet are pursuing the same goals as emergency response and public safety (i.e., to stabilize the situation and provide immediate aid to their fellow citizens/survivors). (One of the finest examples of emergent response can be found in Michelle Sollicito’s “Snowed Out Atlanta: The Inside Story of the Fastest-growing Group in Facebook History.” It recounts her extraordinarily successful effort to mobilize a 50,000-strong emergent response group to bail out a city, county, and State’s faltering response to a severe ice/snow storm.) Mass citizens/survivors action like her’s is, in essence, a form of swarming. It attacks and blankets a problem (consequences) from many directions with speed, flexibility, and convergence. It is autonomous, opportunistic, exhibits self-organizing behavior, provides a form of integrated surveillance and situational awareness (e.g., citizen reporting), and can be quickly netted through social media networks (e.g., crowdsourcing). It relies on basic rules of operation, is fluid and shifting, has no centralized control, yet contributes to achieving the effects desired by the formal response structure (stabilizing the situation).
The failure of formal systems to respond effectively in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe is predictable. Directive control and centralized decision-making will falter. Conditions will deny or hinder organized access to the affected area for a protracted period. The scope of need will exceed the capacity of the traditional response framework and its institutions. Authorities will not have the means to intervene quickly, will not have sufficient resources to meet immediate demand, and will face extraordinary obstacles in delivering capabilities. Citizens/survivors are master improvisers by necessity, and their collective actions compensate in great part for the required startup time, and possible failures, of the formal response system. We need to rethink our networks, hierarchies, and complex rules and instructions that currently present impediments to cooperation. Preparation and improvisation must be synchronized.
It may be a forlorn hope, but it’s time to move from a government-centric approach to a hybrid that combines governments' capabilities with grassroots collective intelligence (e.g., citizen reporting) and collective action/response (e.g., crowdsourcing). The ability to quickly turn information and knowledge into mass action is increasing every day, and is the impetus for explicitly addressing the role of emergent response groups. How would we go about this transformation?
Government could identify physical, virtual and other enablers/force multipliers that can assist or augment citizens/survivors' mass response actions, and embed their use and provision in its capabilities and plans (e.g., the means to provide all-channels communication with swarming networks of citizens/survivors)
Government could commit to eliminating bottlenecks and impediments to cooperation between citizens/survivors groups and responders and response organizations.
Government could incorporate the contributions of citizens/survivors to stabilizing the situation in an agile planning system, which would contribute to superior shared situational awareness (e.g., real-time information sharing), self-organizing simultaneity, and the achievement of shared ends (e.g., stabilization of the situation and deliberate transition to formal, sustained disaster programs and services).
Government could establish the means to quickly support creative contributions that were not envisioned in pre-incident planning, to establish close cooperation between emergency services and citizens/survivors groups, and adopt a ‘disclosure imperative' by disclosing/sharing information, plans, objectives, goals and needs during the catastrophe so that government, nonprofit, and citizens/survivors collective actions can achieve shared ends (e.g., stabilize the situation).
Government could promote and adopt advances in information structuring and processing that support rapid disclosure and information sharing, including tools such as crowdsourcing to provide robust capability to assimilate the dense “tsunami” functional information (e.g., citizen reporting).
The government could identify stabilization criteria and share it widely.
The government could privilege heroic response actions of citizens/survivors over those of responders in word and deed and tell the story over and over again. Response professionals have adopted emergency response and public safety as a profession, whereas citizens/survivors accept danger and risk on the spot, and creative coping is their norm.
Finally, government could reignite the role of leadership in: - Inspiring individuals and groups to action - Identifying/indicating appropriate priorities and methods; setting priorities and sequencing actions that best support citizens/survivors mass response actions that contribute to incident stabilization - Clarifying purpose - Preserving faith and hope - Removing interference and impediments to cooperation - and encouraging solidarity and mutual respect. An Israeli Prime Minister once described unity and resilience with respect to sharing responsibility as “sixty percent my responsibility, and forty percent the public's”. I think the percentage skews heavily the other way, but it makes your and my points.
This may be the single most amazing comment I've ever gotten. Thank you sir, and, when I can figure out how, I shall link to your comment from the article body.
It is now thusly linked.
"Second, authorities often limit information sharing due to mistaken beliefs of inciting panic. Detailed and specific information that helps citizens to make informed decisions does not cause panic as commonly thought by many authorities, while ambiguous information, intended to prevent panic, causes uncertainty and actually has the opposite effect. “Elite panic” is often common in the ranks of government; panic is a rarity in the citizenry."
See COVID as a classic example of this. The authorities deliberately suppressed a ton of data that would have helped in all sorts of ways in part because they appear to have not wanted to trust their citizens to make "the right" choices
Yup
Yes, though I'm inclined to think that they want to be able to arrogate any success to themselves.
Well written and argued. Comports with much of my life experience living here in these united States and abroad. There are another three factors not mentioned here that are worth considering, IMO, for your thesis.
Even in places where it's tribal (like Afghanistan, where I lived for some 14 months), there are checks and balances on violence. Some tribes, like the Kuchi, are nomadic, while other tribes (Zadran) are settled farmers, and still other tribes (Mangal) are mountain people.
1. No one from any of those tribes would feel free to just go out and randomly attack another tribe's members without a very good justification and NOT just because of the possibility of reprisal, but because of what *their own tribe* and leaders might due to someone who initiated "unauthorized" violence that might bring reprisals onto innocent members of the tribe.
In other words, even in Hobbes' claimed "state of nature" where life really is nasty, brutish, and short, it's not *that* nasty.
2. There are frequently limitations on violence imposed by weather and geography. Afghanistan's mountains and winters basically shut down violence of any kind by October. Once the snows close the passes, everyone hunkers down and we'll pick up our feud in the Spring. Maybe...
3. Without government to direct large-scale economies, weapons and ammo are extremely limited, usually to small arms. It's hard to make "violence" on the kind of scale that wipes out entire villages or peoples without national economies that fund large standing armies people by people trained for killing directed by people willing to do so.
These kinds of inherent limitations on violence are ALWAYS ignored by Statists in justifying their claim for the absolute need of the biggest gang and cartel of all - government.
Just wanted to add that for your consideration.
All good points, and all true. Thanks for bringing them into the conversation!
Thanks for your writing!
Excellent article. Very much looking forward to the next one. I spend an inordinate amount of time pondering these things and appreciate your take.
Glad you enjoyed it!
Rousseau and followers seem to have much in common with the cult of the child you discussed in your Frodo essay? I also thought of Lord of the Flies while reading this essay and I'd be interested to read it in consideration of your ideas. Thanks!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Also, thanks for pointing that out. I hadn't thought about it, but you're right, there is a weird kind of overlap between Rousseau and the Cult of the Child. Oddly, between Hobbes and the Cult of the Child, as well. Lord of the Flies author William Golding was...an interesting character, but oh boy could he write!
Another book which came out a year after Lord of the Flies, and was (I believe--though there is dispute on this matter) written in response to it is Tunnel in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein.
The two books argue pointedly with one another on how such a scenario would unfold--each spinning a starkly different picture of the human animal. Golding's shipwrecked boys are Hobbesan, while Heinlein's are much more pragmatic and interested in building themselves a home.
About fifteen years after both books were written, the actual scenario played out--a group of preteen schoolboys got lost at sea and were shipwrecked. When they were rescued, rescuers described their camp as having sports equipment, well-ordered supplies, shelter buildings, signal fires, and showing all the signs of a healthy and growing society (except for women and children, as all the shipwrecked kids were boys). I detail this incident, and its bearing on the literary dispute between Heinlein and Golding (and other writers of shipwreck fiction) in my book The Secrets of the Heinlein Juvenile. You might dig :-)
https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Heinlein-Juvenile-Uncovering-Literature/dp/1946429252
For me, Lord of the Flies is the most overrated book in the literary canon. A nasty, sour little tome.
Thanks for the recommendations. If you have a moment, can you expand on the Hobbes and culture of the child overlap? Im not well versed enough in either to see it clearly!
Victorians in general--not just Rousseaueans--were big cult-of-the-child people. Golding himself was a big devotee (and a bit of a pederast, which actually weirdly has a serious place in the cult of the child), but from the more conservative, Hobbesean end of the spectrum. At this end girls are seen in a rose-colored glasses fashion, as they "naturally" wish to avoid the horror of nature, where boys are seen as in need of "civilizing" as they are Hobbesean engines if let to run amok. Therefore, their innocence must be protected and reinforced, as their own impluses/sinful nature/etc. will otherwise lead them astray. By sheltering them, disciplining them, etc. you can preserve a boy's edenic innocence and form a righteous man out of him once he has the bad taste to enter puberty an start growing up.
(I know that there's a lot of sarcasm in that explanation--it's not directed at you. I am trying to articulate the genuine view as well as I can, but I find it so utterly risible and revolting that my attempts at paraphrase border on parody. Thank you for your understanding!)
A good book to get you started on the cult of the child is called "Erotic Innocence" and is written by James R. Kincaid. It can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Erotic-Innocence-Culture-Child-Molesting/dp/0822321777/
Thanks for the in-depth reply. I imagine the book will speak to the "icky" feeling I get seeing toddlers and children in shirts with suggestive sayings like "ladies man"
to say nothing of the way children are being essentially exploited for instagrams likes (so you have both the poster, oftentimes I'm sad to say a mother, and the people who "like" it)
It may. It was written back in the 90s so Isn't that specific, but.
The thing that bugs me about the Insta likes and the cutsie transgressive T-shirts is on a different vector: they make it very clear that, for the parents, the child is a vanity project, rather than either a legacy project or (gasp!) a person. A cute kid isn't enough of an attention-getter, apparently.
I hate the child sacrifice angle of our culture. One you start seeing it, you notice how pervasive it is. The Cult if the Child is part of it, but it ain't the only part. Got a chapter on it in my forthcoming book The Art of Agency.
This is fascinating. The objectification of children, apart from the sexual, is chilling. When I was teaching I was shocked by the kinds of discourses around children, such as treating them as sources of data which was then turned into prescriptive, authoritarian diktats. Bureaucrats and careerists exploited kids for their own purposes with no remorse. In the name of "research" and "outcomes".
Agreed and looking forward to the book. It needs further "marinating" in my brain as you've described it elsewhere but there seems to be some level of death or aging anxiety at play. Though one might think you wouldn't want to be.... prematurely aging? your child if you're afraid of getting older unless in doing so you create in the child a "peer" (though of course their lack of agency makes them very much not a peer) while still allowing yourself to do all the "grown-ups" things you want to do.
All good points, though I can at least speak to the reasoning of some of the men who dress their children thus:
It attracts the attention of women.
In ascending order, women will hit on a man who otherwise doesn't look interesting if that man is: 1) wearing a wedding ring, 2) accompanied by an adorable animal, 3) accompanied by a baby, 4) accompanied by a baby wearing something super cute that makes people laugh.
I have a buddy who started pulling this shit when his son was born b/c his wife was very aloof and he was lonely.
Hadn't (and likely wouldnt) have thought of that. It's almost as if there IS something to be gained from perspectives outside ones demographic....
This was fantastic. As a very small-time prepper living in a small/town rural community I have often reflected that the best thing to have in an actual disaster is good neighbors, and that to have good neighbors I should actively cultivate them by being one. This, of course, comports well with my Reformed Protestant worldview and mores. If, by God’s providence, I find myself in a terrible situation, what am I there for? Obviously to love my neighbor by helping.
Thank you also for supplying the real world examples, especially New Orleans/Katrina. The number of things the news media reported as fact that turned out to be false (during those days) was enough to convince me to turn off television news forever. I’m going to look for the documentary you cited.
If you were to look at this from a Law of Thermodynamics/entropy point of view, would the argument be that the energy/effort required to maintain order (in whatever sense that may be) is baked into humanity?
In thermodynamical language, I'd put it this way: Dunbar's number-scale order is Humanity's default low-energy state.
I'd say Dunbar's Number is less about the "default low-energy state", ie entropy, and more about conservation of energy.
Maintaining relationships takes energy. Facebook allows people to say they have up to 5,000 "friends", but nobody has even one-tenth that number - to spend even 5 minutes communicating with each person would add up to 42 hours a week, which is to say it'd be a full-time job. And not only would you not have close relationships with any of them, you'd annoy a few of them, too.
In practice, then, you'll choose a few people to spend several hours a week with (spouse, best friend, family), others several minutes a week (friends), and others a few minutes a week (acquaintances).
Interesting perspective from the beginning of the story to the Hobbes intervention. It is quite a lengthy piece deserving of a lengthy comment:
But realistically people do actually learn stuff. After experiencing both sides of being non-governed to being governed. The ultimate choice is to self-govern. That's supposed to be America. Today that choice is clearer. There's never been a better time in history for this moment. A truly self-governed Nation. The foreign ruling class and NGO's realize that too and it's just a matter of who wants it more. The deck is stacked in the foreign bankrolled USG's favor, unfortunately, because of the constant building up of weapons that were always acceptable to the people because of the false and constant fear of wars landing upon it's own shores, again. False protection mechanism that allows for the use of the people's own tax money to stockpile weapons that would be used on themselves by any form of government, in reality, if ever a threat to the bankrolled government for the acts of tyranny & treason were exposed.
We live and learn these things from the past and present. It's come full circle again and the world's bankrolled governments' and imperials are very aware of that too. Every 100 odd years the system comes full circle. The matter is that who is more prepared to lose control of the other.
During the American revolution the colonies had the advantage of distance from the British Imperial Troopers. When the Empire is built within the land; advantage Empire. It's plausible to believe that this strategy was planned all along, at this point in time. Needless to say, but if the bankrolled USG refuses to negotiate themselves out peacefully, through proclamation of Declorations of our Independence again. Many will decide to use force. They don't understand how the deck has already been stacked against this fruition. Many will decide to be the slave rather than the martyr as a matter of survival. The entertainment, political and corporate industries are a prime example and of course believe very selfishly in that philosophy. That which has been the historical human struggle whenever a group of bankrolled psychopaths have banned together and planted their ilk within a relatively peaceful situation. One only has to reference the recent history of America and realize that truth. America is basically trapped now and their bankrolled government has been compromised through fame, weakness, blackmail, bribery, and extortion - the basis and tools of the bankrolled communist regime.
If anyone is interested and can find the courage to get a version of: The Spectre of Communism. There is where they can realize what we're up against. The Communist Manifesto is another area that might be of interest as well.
Although America believes their own bankrolled government would be interested in the facts of the matter. The bankrolled communist regime is so vile, wicked, and power drugged that they will never stop the conquest to control and devour the world with bankrolled assistance until they are All put down like rabid dogs that they are. Knowing this as the bankrolled communist empire does; this revolution cannot be televised.
Find the most peaceful God if you haven't already.
Refusal to be enslaved by fake bankrollers and their slaves might be another opportunity to rid the world of the wicked and be on the final path to eternal freedom as well. Who wants it more?
So far we've seen that money in All it's forms creates the illusion of value and freedom or more precisely wealth. It's up to Humanity and those who know they are only human and recognizes eternal goodness which surrounds the darkness with all its beauty in light that decides their fate.
Wait. Am I still a subscriber? I have missed some posts. And, I have lost the emails I was using to read past articles. I will check my status, but I haven't been getting your emails. I only saw this because Holly cross-posted. Great article, BTW.
I was wondering where you went! Glad to have you back :-)