Recently I have been seeing a trend where the the American left has been described as “weaponizing propriety.” That is, the HR Karens, or whatever petty tyrant of the nagocracy you prefer, take what is normal polite behavior and weaponize the perceived failures to meet those expectations, presumably in a vastly out of proportion manner. For example, Lorenzo Warby uses the term (and concept) in an otherwise
I would quote this: "When people fail to live up to the basic requirements our culture demands we expect, indeed desire, that they feel the sting of shame in the case of minor infractions or indeed the lash of punishment for major."
This is no longer true, on opposite, when you point out that someone is acting strange you are blamed as racist, misogynistic or non emotional. It's that the people waponizing good behavior and I think the term: "waponizing propriety" is exactly right. They do it on purpose and it's only politeness and nice behavior of others from previous times where people were learned to behave nicely which allowed this. There will be no other time. After everyone saw what this people do no more politeness to them and yes, some people have to be strongly learned what is appropriet. No more easy rules and ideology that everyone is nice. It's not and it's fallacy to think otherwise.
I feel you may have misunderstood the point. Weaponizing good behavior isn't what is happening. Instead it is a strong difference in what, exactly, constitutes good behavior, and what is the appropriate response to deviations there from. That's a cultural difference. That doesn't mean it is a fine difference; I am certainly not one to make the preposterous argument that every culture is equally good. Weaponizing propriety in the sense of punishing (to the appropriate extent) violations of good behavior is exactly what we expect. It only becomes a problem when there is a difference in what we expect behavior-wise.
I will try to explain but firstly, I went to the essay which you refers to "A Common Humanity or Bust" but I couldn't find any mention of "weaponizing propriety." I tried to search for it but nothing shows up. Is that my mistake?
In basic sense I agree with Guttermouth example and I also noticed that. The Left uses good norms like be nice to girls, don´t argue with older, be gentle and others to turn them against others. This is I think reason, why now is sociably acceptable to beat women in public - I saw some videos and I think here nobody would protest but I hope not...it´s still painful to write that but who knows, we wont long way. Similar way is with respect to older with result now that older people are ashamed and young people will not even bother to help them anymore. There is many more examples and I think with last three years, there is over with many proprieties which could be weaponized anymore. Many people will not allow any contact with outsiders and all of solidarity seems to be long gone, many people also become ruthless and prepared to engage in self-defense.
I liked the original essay very much, I always wonder, why would women support more promiscuity movement when for them it´s very bad, when man don´t support the child. In that essay there is many interesting points and I also agree, that this whole system was allowed by progress in past which is now gone. The consequences will enormous and I have no idea what will the women do, when they will lose their last stand from schools, academia and politics. They will lose everything and nobody will help them anymore.
A closer reading will reveal that I specifically stated Lorenzo does not use the exact phrase "weaponizing propriety". If you do a word search for just "propriety" in his essay he uses, for example, "ostentatious propriety as a weapon of relational aggression".
I am not sure I follow the rest of your comment...
I had to read this a couple times to make sure I understood what you meant before saying that I don't think this is the meaning- as I understand it- of "weaponizing propriety."
You characterize it as using cultural norms to enforce behaviors or to punish people indirectly by targeting inappropriate behavior. Those are certainly things that exist (and, as you point out accurately, are not bugs but features of society), but my understanding of the concept of "weaponized propriety" is closer to "leveraging the rules and power of propriety to manipulate a situation beyond the maintenance of civil behavior," like taking advantage of a situation in which (for example) decorum frowns on interrupting to filibuster an argument or (for another example) the now-famous example of the influencer who went on six dates a week to avoid having to buy groceries because social convention demanded that her male counterparts would pay for her dinner.
I think I get what you mean, but I would describe that as selectively exploiting rules, not weaponizing propriety exactly. I think discussing your examples helps.
In the case of non-interruption, there are also norms for how long someone is supposed to talk before it gets to be ok to interrupt them. It is equally true that there is insufficient enforcement of propriety with regards to blathering forever as there is over enforcement of not interrupting. The question is why is no one is interrupting or breaking in? I would guess that the blatherer in your example is of a group that is supposed to be "centered" these days and the interrupter would be punished, which is a cultural point.
Similarly with the serial dater, most people would look at that as violating propriety, going on dates primarily for the free food. So she was breaking one rule in a hidden fashion using another in an open fashion. (I assume most people are pretty negative towards here once they find out?)
The contrast between the social reaction to each example is illustrative. In the former case, some people will say "Yea, don't let them interrupt you! Speak your truth!" while others are screaming "Dear god, shut up already!" (at least internally.) In the latter case, I suspect almost everyone would react with distaste upon learning the woman was providing some sort of food based escort service. If my suspicions are correct there, the latter is a case of a pretty universal cultural expectation, a shared sense of propriety, about how going on dates just to get free food is shitty, and even more so to do it over and over as a scheme. In the former case, there is a real divide in how some people see the situation and what is proper in context. I think it is more useful to see that as a conflict of cultural norms, a case of "this tribe does things differently from my tribe." I think that thought should immediately be followed by "and that tribe is fundamentally shitty" but that's another discussion :D
In general though, I think it is important to see that this isn't just abusing the rules we all share, selectively applying them to serve oneself, but rather a deep cultural gap in what the rules even are or should be.
Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is when I hear "weaponizing propriety," I hear "exploiting the norms of propriety in ways they weren't intended."
I agree that the cultural circle in each example is different- that's why I went with those examples, as I felt they illustrated the phenomenon in different spaces.
(There are plenty of others. It was, *sigh*, a brief flare in The Discourse at the time.)
And to your question, yes, she was almost universally reviled, by men and women, after sharing her "life hack."
The only thing I disagree on is that I don't believe this/these examples are "conflicts of cultural norms," as you put it- to say that implies that there is a significant "other culture" where it's normal to, for example, extract monetary value from dates in a way that ISN'T being called prostitution, and to my knowledge, there isn't a culture or subculture that finds this okay in context not considered sex work (with all the baggage or lack thereof that such implies).
That said, I do agree your broader thesis does describe something real- there are certainly discrete subcultures with irreconcilable gaps.
I think the dinner escort lady (lady seems a charitable appellation) is a good example of a shared culture: when people realized the was violating one rule (don't go on dates for non-romance/material goods/false pretense reasons) to exploit another rule (dude pays) people pretty much all agreed it was bad. No gap in culture, everyone pretty much agrees on the rules.
I don't think that is what people typically have in mind when they use phrases like "weaponizing propriety", however. From what I have seen, and that is probably a tiny subset I admit, people use it to mean making claims of violating propriety to punish others for things that are either not really violations of propriety, or demanding punishments much harsher than justified by the offense. Usually something like "Guys gets fired for a Facebook post decades old where he said women weren't always good at math" or the like, where under investigation it turns out someone at work dimed him out to HR complaining about the laboriously dug up post.
Why I think it is wrong to call that weaponizing propriety is because many people (most?) would say first of all "Well, is it true, what he said?", followed by "Well, it isn't a big deal what he wrote like a decade ago. A finger wagging is more than sufficient," followed by "That is absolutely not the kind of thing you should lose a job over!" It isn't THOSE people's propriety that is being weaponized, because the response doesn't match those people's sense of propriety. However, there are a few, maybe a lot, of people who would clutch their pearls and cry "The misogynistic bastard! He must be expunged from polite society!" and applaud the firing as absolutely appropriate. That's a pretty huge culture gap, with very different norms of propriety.
That's a much clearer example; there are two extremely distinct cultures in evidence there.
What makes it hard to untangle is that, in this example, if the "yes, he should lose his job for a tweet" culture "wins," doesn't that mean that it was, in fact, the dominant culture of the environment in question?
As I said in a recent discussion with someone elsewhere, "cancel culture" doesn't carry the force of law; it's people reacting to the predicted behavior of others signaling outrage. No one is REQUIRED to fire anyone for speech that may or may not be "bigoted" or "hate speech." That they DO so implies that it's a norm that they are choosing to adhere to.
There is, technically, nothing legally stopping a company from allowing any sort of speech or behavior from their employees they wish that doesn't fall under existing hate speech or sexual harassment laws that may or may not exist in their jurisdiction. And there's nothing legally requiring them to fire someone for tweeting something like "girls suck at math" or "latinas are insane" or "ching chong wing wong." They're making tactical choices when they do so.
That the demands are obeyed when they don't necessarily need to be is, to me, the interesting part.
For example, smarter businesspeople than me- more than one- have told me recently that the whole Bud Lite controversy wasn't actually what caused the big dip in InBev's value; it was just coincidentally timed with a lot of other loss events, some expected and some not. Their public reaction to the outrage was simply using the opportunity to do some brand repositioning.
I think the "winning" culture in this sense does in fact have the force of law behind it. While businesses aren't require to fire people for seemingly minor offenses, the liability issues for "creating a hostile work environment", and the unwillingness for judges to summarily throw out even silly cases, makes it pretty well legally required. A case of the process (getting sued and paying a lot of cash to settle) being the punishment. Even a big company that said "No, fuck you all and your stupid complaints" would have a rough time of it if targeted enough. Twitter and Musk might be the closest to a counter to that example, and he is probably at least one standard deviation from the norm when it comes to CEO willing to tell people to fuck themselves and deal with controversy.
I think there is also a disconnect where people tend to overestimate how much of the population really is part of the new culture. I suspect the really hardcore zealots are only like 20% tops, but given their dominance in media appear to be far greater, possibly a majority. My guess is that makes business leaders even more wary to stand up to them than they would otherwise be. (Or would optimally be in a strategic sense.) I think that is why, from the other side of the profit equation, so many hyper-woke movies and the like have been failing so hard: their target audience is MUCH smaller than people think, and their divisive nature is turning off more people than it attracts.
I don't know a lot of the Bud Lite business stuff, but I am a little skeptical that a giant controversy didn't do a lot to knee cap them in a very competitive market. Maybe not all of it, but when Disney is having similar problems, Target, etc. I would want to see a lot of evidence before the obvious "you purposefully alienated over half your customer base" isn't the biggest reason. Especially with something like beer, which, while I have no personal stake or experience in, seems about as much driven by brand identification as anything, other than maybe price. Beers seem to be marketed as "The beer for this kind of person", and people seem to accept the marketing framing, so positioning your beer as "The beer for <10% of the population, tops" seems like a strange move to me if your beer is currently the best selling for the entire population. If I were starting a new beer brand, "Beer for the Queer" would totally be a good niche I would consider, but not if I had an established brand.
🗨 It suffices for an intransigent minority [...] to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
🗨 You must signal your virtue to get access to money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the surface, 'tis all flat bland boring like that ↑↑. Wait...
🗨 ...but what if they know something we don’t?
Hint: “too woke to fail” riches 😏
🗨 Unlike the crash of 2008, though, the next stimulus event will not be a fiat free-for-all. Instead, it will be RESET; a highly limited rescue plan with digital money being infused into select institutions. In other words, only a portion of the existing economy will be given a life boat, and guess who will qualify for a spot on the raft?
--
PS Not to forget, the Big Three alone (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) own the commanding chunk of economy across all sectors 😒
I was actually unfamiliar with the word "propriety" until reading your essay just now, so I learned a new word today. Thank you!
"So what is going on that has people groping around for some way to describe the process of losing your job because you used pronouns to refer to someone which that someone doesn’t like?"
Rather than "weaponized propriety," how about "forced artificial propriety?" That may speak a bit more to the left's move towards creating a fake culture that vilifies those who cannot keep up with the Pronouns of the Day, while seemingly seeking to normalize such practices as shitting your pants for fun.
It's a great word, right! Adam Smith uses is quite a bit, which is where I picked it up from. A shame it isn't more commonly used, correctly at least.
I think you are putting your finger really close to the crux of the problem, which is that the left's culture has spun wildly away from standard American culture. My suspicion is that the mechanism at work is a combination of a power focused victim culture with no limiting principle combined with being highly linked into the internet. The result is a rapidly evolving culture, one that selects for being part of the most marginalized and oppressed group. Barring that, the second best option is being the most ostentatiously zealous defender of said groups. (I say second best, but for the more power focused that is clearly the best option, if both are out.) So while the left has been drifting off for decades, the past 20 years has seen it get exponentially faster as the feedback loops get tighter. Self sorting into cities probably lends itself to the effect, but I suspect that the internet is what really kicked things into overdrive.
I think that you've done a fantastic job here of succinctly summarizing the sociological ontology of the situation at hand:
"[A] combination of a power focused victim culture with no limiting principle combined with being highly linked into the internet ... [produced] a rapidly evolving culture ... that selects for being part of the most marginalized and oppressed group [or] the most ostentatiously zealous defender of said groups."
I was just calling it something along the lines of, "the latest manifestation of evil's usual manipulative, manufactured bullshit," but your description is WAY loftier ;)
I need an editor like you :D (or one at all, to be honest.)
I am glad to hear that the diagnosis rings true to you. I have been thinking lately that many have been not quite getting at the root of the issue, and one of the key gaps has been grasping that it isn't an issue of "well, these people are just like us culturally, just a bit more extreme" but rather "this is a culture interaction between groups as alien as Muslims and Hindus in 17th century India." (Or maybe the British and Indians, I don't know which is a better analogy.) People talk a lot about how the current state is the end result of the Enlightenment, or the natural outcome of focusing on individualism and liberty, but I think they are misunderstanding what they see. The current leftist culture is something entirely different, merely wearing the skin of the Enlightenment, individualism and liberty, while instead being deeply committed to its own unthinking religious dogma, silencing debate and inquiry, group level preferences and hierarchy, and coercion used freely to advance goals of the state and those in power. I think it is important to understand that culture itself is the antithesis of classical liberal, Western culture, that it is in fact a cultural/religious war we are fighting, and unfortunately the other side has largely taken control of the government, because controlling the state power is the central goal of their cultural mindset.
I don't want to give the impression that I think different cultures can't live fairly happily side by side. I think the key to that working, however, is each culture being content to not use the power of the state, or other violence, to coerce members of the other into following their rules. At the moment the American woke left has using state power to achieve their ends as their raison d'etre, so coexisting can't continue.
BAM. I think you absolutely nailed it, on multiple levels.
1. The Leftist culture (so-called "Woke," as is its appropriate name in its native tongue of DoubleSpeak) is the ANTITHESIS of freedom and individuality. Hair dye -- and I have used it in the past! -- doth not an individual make. Likewise, a brightly-colored choice of wardrobe does not always signal a vibrant internal landscape. These entities are chameleonic, with all due apologizes to my favorite brightly-colored lizards, but unlike real chameleons, they generally fail to even so much as offer aesthetic value. These people are nothing more than the whiners of society, those unable to distinguish themselves via their own merits, and they are grasping at a form of collectivism that makes the *false* promise of individuality in order to avoid facing the fact that they are, in fact, that faceless guy in all of the NPC memes. (THE LEFT CAN'T MEME. Memes are little tiny hilarious snippets of truth. What does THAT tell you?)
2. The so-called "culture" (I would argue that it is in fact a cultural VOID) of said collectivist Left is fundamentally incompatible with essentially ANY other culture that has earned, by the trials of time and/or potential, the right to call itself such. I'm a veterinarian and animal biologist, so Human sociology is pretty new to me, let alone Human culture. I'm currently reading a fiction novel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is EXTREMELY eye-opening to me (those are two cultures about whom, as a gentile of German lineage, I've always taken the attitude of, "I don't even want to know"). I'm not yet done with the book, but so far, it's evident to me that those two cultures have MUCH more of a chance of peacefully coexisting in the future than does the Woke Left and The Rest of Us.
... Why? ... Because this group has not only, as you accurately state, "largely taken control of the government, because controlling the state power is the central goal of their cultural mindset" -- but because that IS their only reason for existing in the first place -- POWER. Given that their culture is, in fact, essentially nonexistent -- a Lovecraftian amalgam of ever-shifting constraints and norms that gives the Eldrich Gods a run for their money in terms of shift and slipperiness -- they literally CANNOT exist outside of the ideal of -- to call's it like I see's it -- total World Domination. There is a reason that I refer to this ideology as The Borg. That, to me, is all it really is: An insectoid collective with no other purpose other than to be that collective. Beneath the bright colors and gaudy symbols, I see only bug-people.
PS. I don't think that you need me as an editor, or any editor, really. Just re-reading your own work until you're comfortable being your own editor is enough. The fact that you are an eloquent writer with cogent thoughts is MORE than enough in the Brave New World ..! ;)
I am not that kind of doctor, I am not that kind of doctor! :D
I would quote this: "When people fail to live up to the basic requirements our culture demands we expect, indeed desire, that they feel the sting of shame in the case of minor infractions or indeed the lash of punishment for major."
This is no longer true, on opposite, when you point out that someone is acting strange you are blamed as racist, misogynistic or non emotional. It's that the people waponizing good behavior and I think the term: "waponizing propriety" is exactly right. They do it on purpose and it's only politeness and nice behavior of others from previous times where people were learned to behave nicely which allowed this. There will be no other time. After everyone saw what this people do no more politeness to them and yes, some people have to be strongly learned what is appropriet. No more easy rules and ideology that everyone is nice. It's not and it's fallacy to think otherwise.
I feel you may have misunderstood the point. Weaponizing good behavior isn't what is happening. Instead it is a strong difference in what, exactly, constitutes good behavior, and what is the appropriate response to deviations there from. That's a cultural difference. That doesn't mean it is a fine difference; I am certainly not one to make the preposterous argument that every culture is equally good. Weaponizing propriety in the sense of punishing (to the appropriate extent) violations of good behavior is exactly what we expect. It only becomes a problem when there is a difference in what we expect behavior-wise.
I will try to explain but firstly, I went to the essay which you refers to "A Common Humanity or Bust" but I couldn't find any mention of "weaponizing propriety." I tried to search for it but nothing shows up. Is that my mistake?
In basic sense I agree with Guttermouth example and I also noticed that. The Left uses good norms like be nice to girls, don´t argue with older, be gentle and others to turn them against others. This is I think reason, why now is sociably acceptable to beat women in public - I saw some videos and I think here nobody would protest but I hope not...it´s still painful to write that but who knows, we wont long way. Similar way is with respect to older with result now that older people are ashamed and young people will not even bother to help them anymore. There is many more examples and I think with last three years, there is over with many proprieties which could be weaponized anymore. Many people will not allow any contact with outsiders and all of solidarity seems to be long gone, many people also become ruthless and prepared to engage in self-defense.
I liked the original essay very much, I always wonder, why would women support more promiscuity movement when for them it´s very bad, when man don´t support the child. In that essay there is many interesting points and I also agree, that this whole system was allowed by progress in past which is now gone. The consequences will enormous and I have no idea what will the women do, when they will lose their last stand from schools, academia and politics. They will lose everything and nobody will help them anymore.
A closer reading will reveal that I specifically stated Lorenzo does not use the exact phrase "weaponizing propriety". If you do a word search for just "propriety" in his essay he uses, for example, "ostentatious propriety as a weapon of relational aggression".
I am not sure I follow the rest of your comment...
I had to read this a couple times to make sure I understood what you meant before saying that I don't think this is the meaning- as I understand it- of "weaponizing propriety."
You characterize it as using cultural norms to enforce behaviors or to punish people indirectly by targeting inappropriate behavior. Those are certainly things that exist (and, as you point out accurately, are not bugs but features of society), but my understanding of the concept of "weaponized propriety" is closer to "leveraging the rules and power of propriety to manipulate a situation beyond the maintenance of civil behavior," like taking advantage of a situation in which (for example) decorum frowns on interrupting to filibuster an argument or (for another example) the now-famous example of the influencer who went on six dates a week to avoid having to buy groceries because social convention demanded that her male counterparts would pay for her dinner.
I think I get what you mean, but I would describe that as selectively exploiting rules, not weaponizing propriety exactly. I think discussing your examples helps.
In the case of non-interruption, there are also norms for how long someone is supposed to talk before it gets to be ok to interrupt them. It is equally true that there is insufficient enforcement of propriety with regards to blathering forever as there is over enforcement of not interrupting. The question is why is no one is interrupting or breaking in? I would guess that the blatherer in your example is of a group that is supposed to be "centered" these days and the interrupter would be punished, which is a cultural point.
Similarly with the serial dater, most people would look at that as violating propriety, going on dates primarily for the free food. So she was breaking one rule in a hidden fashion using another in an open fashion. (I assume most people are pretty negative towards here once they find out?)
The contrast between the social reaction to each example is illustrative. In the former case, some people will say "Yea, don't let them interrupt you! Speak your truth!" while others are screaming "Dear god, shut up already!" (at least internally.) In the latter case, I suspect almost everyone would react with distaste upon learning the woman was providing some sort of food based escort service. If my suspicions are correct there, the latter is a case of a pretty universal cultural expectation, a shared sense of propriety, about how going on dates just to get free food is shitty, and even more so to do it over and over as a scheme. In the former case, there is a real divide in how some people see the situation and what is proper in context. I think it is more useful to see that as a conflict of cultural norms, a case of "this tribe does things differently from my tribe." I think that thought should immediately be followed by "and that tribe is fundamentally shitty" but that's another discussion :D
In general though, I think it is important to see that this isn't just abusing the rules we all share, selectively applying them to serve oneself, but rather a deep cultural gap in what the rules even are or should be.
Yeah, I guess what I'm saying is when I hear "weaponizing propriety," I hear "exploiting the norms of propriety in ways they weren't intended."
I agree that the cultural circle in each example is different- that's why I went with those examples, as I felt they illustrated the phenomenon in different spaces.
BT dubs, this is the story if you weren't aware:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/woman-went-on-six-dates-a-week-to-save-on-food-i-didnt-buy-groceries-for-two-years/ARNZPF4VSNFKHHS43STBICKBMA/#:~:text=Vivian%20Tu%2C%20known%20on%20TikTok%20by%20the%20handle%20%40YourRichBFF%2C,didn't%20buy%20groceries%20once.
(There are plenty of others. It was, *sigh*, a brief flare in The Discourse at the time.)
And to your question, yes, she was almost universally reviled, by men and women, after sharing her "life hack."
The only thing I disagree on is that I don't believe this/these examples are "conflicts of cultural norms," as you put it- to say that implies that there is a significant "other culture" where it's normal to, for example, extract monetary value from dates in a way that ISN'T being called prostitution, and to my knowledge, there isn't a culture or subculture that finds this okay in context not considered sex work (with all the baggage or lack thereof that such implies).
That said, I do agree your broader thesis does describe something real- there are certainly discrete subcultures with irreconcilable gaps.
I think the dinner escort lady (lady seems a charitable appellation) is a good example of a shared culture: when people realized the was violating one rule (don't go on dates for non-romance/material goods/false pretense reasons) to exploit another rule (dude pays) people pretty much all agreed it was bad. No gap in culture, everyone pretty much agrees on the rules.
I don't think that is what people typically have in mind when they use phrases like "weaponizing propriety", however. From what I have seen, and that is probably a tiny subset I admit, people use it to mean making claims of violating propriety to punish others for things that are either not really violations of propriety, or demanding punishments much harsher than justified by the offense. Usually something like "Guys gets fired for a Facebook post decades old where he said women weren't always good at math" or the like, where under investigation it turns out someone at work dimed him out to HR complaining about the laboriously dug up post.
Why I think it is wrong to call that weaponizing propriety is because many people (most?) would say first of all "Well, is it true, what he said?", followed by "Well, it isn't a big deal what he wrote like a decade ago. A finger wagging is more than sufficient," followed by "That is absolutely not the kind of thing you should lose a job over!" It isn't THOSE people's propriety that is being weaponized, because the response doesn't match those people's sense of propriety. However, there are a few, maybe a lot, of people who would clutch their pearls and cry "The misogynistic bastard! He must be expunged from polite society!" and applaud the firing as absolutely appropriate. That's a pretty huge culture gap, with very different norms of propriety.
That's a much clearer example; there are two extremely distinct cultures in evidence there.
What makes it hard to untangle is that, in this example, if the "yes, he should lose his job for a tweet" culture "wins," doesn't that mean that it was, in fact, the dominant culture of the environment in question?
As I said in a recent discussion with someone elsewhere, "cancel culture" doesn't carry the force of law; it's people reacting to the predicted behavior of others signaling outrage. No one is REQUIRED to fire anyone for speech that may or may not be "bigoted" or "hate speech." That they DO so implies that it's a norm that they are choosing to adhere to.
There is, technically, nothing legally stopping a company from allowing any sort of speech or behavior from their employees they wish that doesn't fall under existing hate speech or sexual harassment laws that may or may not exist in their jurisdiction. And there's nothing legally requiring them to fire someone for tweeting something like "girls suck at math" or "latinas are insane" or "ching chong wing wong." They're making tactical choices when they do so.
That the demands are obeyed when they don't necessarily need to be is, to me, the interesting part.
For example, smarter businesspeople than me- more than one- have told me recently that the whole Bud Lite controversy wasn't actually what caused the big dip in InBev's value; it was just coincidentally timed with a lot of other loss events, some expected and some not. Their public reaction to the outrage was simply using the opportunity to do some brand repositioning.
It's so rare that I have a contextual reason to say "ching chong wing wong" these days.
God, it is all I hear all day long around here... or at least that is what it sounds like to my big round ears. :)
😭 imageio.forbes.com/specials-images/imageserve/500052714/960x0.jpg
I think the "winning" culture in this sense does in fact have the force of law behind it. While businesses aren't require to fire people for seemingly minor offenses, the liability issues for "creating a hostile work environment", and the unwillingness for judges to summarily throw out even silly cases, makes it pretty well legally required. A case of the process (getting sued and paying a lot of cash to settle) being the punishment. Even a big company that said "No, fuck you all and your stupid complaints" would have a rough time of it if targeted enough. Twitter and Musk might be the closest to a counter to that example, and he is probably at least one standard deviation from the norm when it comes to CEO willing to tell people to fuck themselves and deal with controversy.
I think there is also a disconnect where people tend to overestimate how much of the population really is part of the new culture. I suspect the really hardcore zealots are only like 20% tops, but given their dominance in media appear to be far greater, possibly a majority. My guess is that makes business leaders even more wary to stand up to them than they would otherwise be. (Or would optimally be in a strategic sense.) I think that is why, from the other side of the profit equation, so many hyper-woke movies and the like have been failing so hard: their target audience is MUCH smaller than people think, and their divisive nature is turning off more people than it attracts.
I don't know a lot of the Bud Lite business stuff, but I am a little skeptical that a giant controversy didn't do a lot to knee cap them in a very competitive market. Maybe not all of it, but when Disney is having similar problems, Target, etc. I would want to see a lot of evidence before the obvious "you purposefully alienated over half your customer base" isn't the biggest reason. Especially with something like beer, which, while I have no personal stake or experience in, seems about as much driven by brand identification as anything, other than maybe price. Beers seem to be marketed as "The beer for this kind of person", and people seem to accept the marketing framing, so positioning your beer as "The beer for <10% of the population, tops" seems like a strange move to me if your beer is currently the best selling for the entire population. If I were starting a new beer brand, "Beer for the Queer" would totally be a good niche I would consider, but not if I had an established brand.
Time’s ripe to re-visit Taleb 😉
🗨 It suffices for an intransigent minority [...] to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences.
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority --> medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15
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Wrt business stuff, I'm about to commit the impropriety of self-reposting 😊 From Barsoom pastures ↓↓
ESG Dystopia: Why Corporations Are Doubling Down On Woke Even As They Lose Billions --> alt-market.us/esg-dystopia-why-corporations-are-doubling-down-on-woke-even-as-they-lose-billions 🔥
🗨 You must signal your virtue to get access to money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
On the surface, 'tis all flat bland boring like that ↑↑. Wait...
🗨 ...but what if they know something we don’t?
Hint: “too woke to fail” riches 😏
🗨 Unlike the crash of 2008, though, the next stimulus event will not be a fiat free-for-all. Instead, it will be RESET; a highly limited rescue plan with digital money being infused into select institutions. In other words, only a portion of the existing economy will be given a life boat, and guess who will qualify for a spot on the raft?
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PS Not to forget, the Big Three alone (BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street) own the commanding chunk of economy across all sectors 😒
💬 exploiting the norms of propriety in ways they weren't intended 👌
Weaponizing would seem the very bullseye-word here, terse and vigorously expressive 😊
I was actually unfamiliar with the word "propriety" until reading your essay just now, so I learned a new word today. Thank you!
"So what is going on that has people groping around for some way to describe the process of losing your job because you used pronouns to refer to someone which that someone doesn’t like?"
Rather than "weaponized propriety," how about "forced artificial propriety?" That may speak a bit more to the left's move towards creating a fake culture that vilifies those who cannot keep up with the Pronouns of the Day, while seemingly seeking to normalize such practices as shitting your pants for fun.
It's a great word, right! Adam Smith uses is quite a bit, which is where I picked it up from. A shame it isn't more commonly used, correctly at least.
I think you are putting your finger really close to the crux of the problem, which is that the left's culture has spun wildly away from standard American culture. My suspicion is that the mechanism at work is a combination of a power focused victim culture with no limiting principle combined with being highly linked into the internet. The result is a rapidly evolving culture, one that selects for being part of the most marginalized and oppressed group. Barring that, the second best option is being the most ostentatiously zealous defender of said groups. (I say second best, but for the more power focused that is clearly the best option, if both are out.) So while the left has been drifting off for decades, the past 20 years has seen it get exponentially faster as the feedback loops get tighter. Self sorting into cities probably lends itself to the effect, but I suspect that the internet is what really kicked things into overdrive.
I think that you've done a fantastic job here of succinctly summarizing the sociological ontology of the situation at hand:
"[A] combination of a power focused victim culture with no limiting principle combined with being highly linked into the internet ... [produced] a rapidly evolving culture ... that selects for being part of the most marginalized and oppressed group [or] the most ostentatiously zealous defender of said groups."
I was just calling it something along the lines of, "the latest manifestation of evil's usual manipulative, manufactured bullshit," but your description is WAY loftier ;)
I need an editor like you :D (or one at all, to be honest.)
I am glad to hear that the diagnosis rings true to you. I have been thinking lately that many have been not quite getting at the root of the issue, and one of the key gaps has been grasping that it isn't an issue of "well, these people are just like us culturally, just a bit more extreme" but rather "this is a culture interaction between groups as alien as Muslims and Hindus in 17th century India." (Or maybe the British and Indians, I don't know which is a better analogy.) People talk a lot about how the current state is the end result of the Enlightenment, or the natural outcome of focusing on individualism and liberty, but I think they are misunderstanding what they see. The current leftist culture is something entirely different, merely wearing the skin of the Enlightenment, individualism and liberty, while instead being deeply committed to its own unthinking religious dogma, silencing debate and inquiry, group level preferences and hierarchy, and coercion used freely to advance goals of the state and those in power. I think it is important to understand that culture itself is the antithesis of classical liberal, Western culture, that it is in fact a cultural/religious war we are fighting, and unfortunately the other side has largely taken control of the government, because controlling the state power is the central goal of their cultural mindset.
I don't want to give the impression that I think different cultures can't live fairly happily side by side. I think the key to that working, however, is each culture being content to not use the power of the state, or other violence, to coerce members of the other into following their rules. At the moment the American woke left has using state power to achieve their ends as their raison d'etre, so coexisting can't continue.
BAM. I think you absolutely nailed it, on multiple levels.
1. The Leftist culture (so-called "Woke," as is its appropriate name in its native tongue of DoubleSpeak) is the ANTITHESIS of freedom and individuality. Hair dye -- and I have used it in the past! -- doth not an individual make. Likewise, a brightly-colored choice of wardrobe does not always signal a vibrant internal landscape. These entities are chameleonic, with all due apologizes to my favorite brightly-colored lizards, but unlike real chameleons, they generally fail to even so much as offer aesthetic value. These people are nothing more than the whiners of society, those unable to distinguish themselves via their own merits, and they are grasping at a form of collectivism that makes the *false* promise of individuality in order to avoid facing the fact that they are, in fact, that faceless guy in all of the NPC memes. (THE LEFT CAN'T MEME. Memes are little tiny hilarious snippets of truth. What does THAT tell you?)
2. The so-called "culture" (I would argue that it is in fact a cultural VOID) of said collectivist Left is fundamentally incompatible with essentially ANY other culture that has earned, by the trials of time and/or potential, the right to call itself such. I'm a veterinarian and animal biologist, so Human sociology is pretty new to me, let alone Human culture. I'm currently reading a fiction novel about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which is EXTREMELY eye-opening to me (those are two cultures about whom, as a gentile of German lineage, I've always taken the attitude of, "I don't even want to know"). I'm not yet done with the book, but so far, it's evident to me that those two cultures have MUCH more of a chance of peacefully coexisting in the future than does the Woke Left and The Rest of Us.
... Why? ... Because this group has not only, as you accurately state, "largely taken control of the government, because controlling the state power is the central goal of their cultural mindset" -- but because that IS their only reason for existing in the first place -- POWER. Given that their culture is, in fact, essentially nonexistent -- a Lovecraftian amalgam of ever-shifting constraints and norms that gives the Eldrich Gods a run for their money in terms of shift and slipperiness -- they literally CANNOT exist outside of the ideal of -- to call's it like I see's it -- total World Domination. There is a reason that I refer to this ideology as The Borg. That, to me, is all it really is: An insectoid collective with no other purpose other than to be that collective. Beneath the bright colors and gaudy symbols, I see only bug-people.
PS. I don't think that you need me as an editor, or any editor, really. Just re-reading your own work until you're comfortable being your own editor is enough. The fact that you are an eloquent writer with cogent thoughts is MORE than enough in the Brave New World ..! ;)