"That’s why so much corporate work is so unsatisfying, too; if you can wonder “would anyone notice if I stopped doing this?” you have already passed the feeling useless horizon."
That, right there, is the essence of Graeber's 'bullshit jobs' phenomenon (probably more succinctly than Graeber himself articulated it).
Nailed it. The same logic that tells people they are fighting systemic racism by burning down the stores in black neighborhoods tells people they need to censor those who question vaccine efficacy, tells people they need to send money to feed the world, tells people they need to vote to make sure some underprivileged person somewhere gets something for it... all that relies on the initial dopamine hit of "Boy, aren't I a good fellow, doing these good things?" and relies more on the yawning abyss of feeling that opens up afterwards as your brain responds "you have done nothing." Like all addictions, they aren't chasing the high, they are fleeing from the low.
Why are most NGOS and non-profits leftist? There's your answer.
(I feel like I should be citing someone on that point... am I forgetting some notable author that wrote on why non-profits are leftist? Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell perhaps?
I wonder if there is a negative feedback loop here. See if this makes sense:
1) Life gets easier + government gets more paternalistic = people are less incentivized to make hard choices and exercise discretion and do what they think is right/reasonable/just/merciful (i.e., "good"). There is less need to exercise discretion because the potential for really negative consequences is decreasing as a result of technology, plentitude, and government safety nets. The need for rules and norms to correspond to actual positive consequences, thereby functioning as useful heuristics for guiding "good" conduct, decreases.
2) People have less ability to exercise discretion to do the right thing or the reasonable thing or the just thing or the merciful thing, and thus they have less practice determining whether the outcomes of their actions were good, so it's hard for them to tell what actions are good, so they increasingly need government/blue checks/media to tell them what is right and what is wrong (following rules = good person, rather than getting good at making good choices = good person). Demand is met; more arbitrary norms and rules follow.
3) People fully lose their sense of agency and utility, and increasingly look to adherence to these arbitrary norms and rules (or signaling of adherence to them) to derive their sense of personal worth, while at the same time losing the ability to see that the rules are arbitrary, while increasingly needing more rules to follow. Smugness and self-satisfaction derived from cost-free, arbitrary virtue-signaling of rule-following replaces the sense of satisfaction (and positive reinforcement) that would otherwise have been derived from the positive feedback (e.g., gratitude) that people used to receive from those close to them when they did a good thing.
By the time step 3 is reached, people have absolute moral license to be as bad/unreasonable/unjust/unmerciful as they want to be, as long as they have performed the arbitrary purification rituals at the altar of the current thing along the way. A person can call for physical violence against someone they've never met, with little to no justification, as long as they have a blue and yellow flag on their profile, or put a mask on their kid, or drive a Prius, or have an "In this house we believe" sign in their front yard (or, for the opposite side of the spectrum, have an NRA bumper sticker, go to church on Sundays, fly a Trump flag, etc.)
Maybe this comment is just a restatement of the "bad times --> strong men --> good times --> weak men --> bad times..." meme.
Yeah, there is definitely a cognitive dissonance or a paradoxical nature to nearly everything. I have to act in a way that leads to or is likely to lead to certain "good" results, but I have to refrain from debauching myself once the "good" results accrue to me. Similarly, we as a civilization should develop norms that encourage benefits to accrue, but also develop norms that discourage debauching ourselves on the benefits that do accrue.
That's why I have this sense that practicing discretion is so very important.
I think this describes a different dynamic, and a true one. Both Smith and Aristotle make a point that virtue is something that must be practiced, and just following rules is a very weak alternative.
All civilizations have had bouts of decadence disease after getting too successful, but I think modern civs (and Rome) both hosed things up by emphasizing the paternalistic/bad choice enabling government. The middle and lower classes have often served as as reserve of good sense when the upper classes get silly, as the poor especially don't have the kind of cushion that allows them to forego virtue entirely, and the middle classes don't want to screw up and become poor and so don't take on all the vices of the rich. We managed to ensure the poor and lower classes needed no virtue, and were in fact encouraged to not have any, and the middle class has squeezed into either being closer to the poor or the striver managerial class.
I think largely by not removing all the terrors of poverty. Maurico Miller talked about that a lot on Econtalk about his book The Alternative (https://www.thealternativebook.org/). The quote that really stuck with me was that we (gov programs) make poverty more comfortable but not more escapable. I take that to mean that it saps one's drive to escape poverty, disincentivizing work and thrift, along with the other virtues the poor clearly lack. (In fact, it often seems to me that the very poor often imitate the rich, down to the same vices.) Much like how people who are in bad situations deal with it by porn, video games and drugs/alcohol instead of fixing the underlying situation, the poor are helped in such a way as to make them numb to their circumstances to some extent, but that numbness keeps them from developing the virtue to correct it.
Put another way, diabetics have a big problem due to losing feeling in their extremities like their feet. It isn't a problem because they loved foot rubs, but because if they cut their foot (or just get an awful blister) they don't realize the problem and wind up getting horrific infections. Lack of pain in a fine situation is good, but lack of pain in a bad situation merely covers up the signals that you need to get out.
Local action is most important. It should be a crime to send philanthropic money (or any kind if my extremism is allowed to interject) further than 300 miles from your county line, and cost a percentage for every 50 miles it goes past it.
Sometimes the location in question bans it. I remember a talk by David Schmidtz of University of Arizona about a trip he took to Africa, and how one village (county?) had a sign that said something like "No foreign clothing". He couldn't understand why, and was taken the next day to talk to people. Apparently the village had once had a pretty thriving clothing industry, then one day some Western do gooders dropped a container or two of used cloths off. That pretty much killed the industry, as everyone had lots of free clothing; all the businesses left for other places. Normally, hey, that'd be alright because now people could do other things and just get free cloths! Except there weren't anymore free cloths. Those two containers were it, and after a few years people needed to buy clothing again and... whoops. Now they were worse off because they had to travel rather far to the next region (apparently too far to bother setting up a supply line for a shop locally?) So they lost their local industry and didn't even gain a source of low cost clothing. (That's the short, "I remember this from 8 years ago" version.) (Edit: forgot to clarify, "So they banned charitable donations of clothing, and all clothing that wasn't to sell or personally owned.")
He also related that he was pretty upset about the whole thing, and was tearing up a bit in front of the old ladies explaining all this to him. He asked what [we Americans] could do that would actually help, since so many people wanted to and apparently we just keep hurting them instead. They took him seriously, thought for a few moments and said "We really like those plastic water [milk] jugs you guys make. Very handy for carrying back and forth to the well, and we can't make anything like that here." Needless to say, I have yet to see any charitable organizations trying to raise money to collect empty gallon water bottles and ship them to Africa. It probably just doesn't have the same high minded feel to it, more's the pity.
E. Michael Jones talks about this same thing when he speaks about his book about Tanzania and it's leader Julius Nerere.
How he outlines it is that (((rag-pickers))) here in the states collect used clothing and send overseas for "charity" to scalp tons of money that is available via US grants and programs. These clothes ruin local industry. The same thing happens with food as thousands of tons of rice and such are sent over, decimating local farming as there is no way to compete with free crap. It keeps the continent destitute and supplies a never ending pipeline of virtue that unthinking, unaffected urban sorts can suckle off of to feel good about themselves in some minute way.
EMJ also relays how most of the strongest economies in history all started with their own textile manufacturing and the peripheral industries of the same. It's skilled labor and there is always demand, humans NEED clothing. England had wool, Florence made it into finery and goofy berets and got rich. America supplied much of Europe with cotton. China makes essentially all of the worlds clothing now and look how they are doing these days. Of course, once each of these cultures moved from production and manufacturing to banking is when the declines began. But that is my own aside and a topic for another time.
Africans being shut out of developing such primordial industries and economies as agriculture and textiles of their own via "charity-so-called" is what does the most damage to that continent.
Clothing is a very visible aspect of culture too, so when that is taken away or prevented, and everyone is pretty much wearing dirty old Rolling Stones t-shirts, the bonds of greater societies break down and eventually it rolls back into tribes of mercenaries looking to subsist by carrying out the exploitative whims of foreign interests.
Interestingly, China has stopped doing much of the lower end textile work, with it moving down towards Malaysia, Sri Lanka and in some cases African countries. It is interesting to look at the labels of cloths over the decades and see how it shifts from Japan to Taiwan/HongKong, then China, now the farther SE Asian countries. As you say, it becomes pretty technical work after a while, and the workers start getting more valuable in other industries. It is funny to think that Toyota used to make cloth...
Between the governments of African nations and other countries trying to help and failing so hard, it is difficult to judge which is doing the most harm.
Fair enough on the final point. All these things shift freely and quickly between the categories of cause and effect when the scale is large enough and depending on the context.
I've learned to be skeptical of folks whose high-minded moral concern is always directed at people and events halfway around the world. Usually such people are douchebags to the people they actually interact with in person. Poor huddled masses starving in some third-world country are easy to love as an abtraction; none of the nuance or human shortcomings that you have to deal with if you're helping someone closer to home. Kinda like the DC and NYC politicians who love illegal immigrants...until they start showing up in their own cities by the thousands.
Hah! That is exactly where my mind went by the end of your first sentence :D
The fact that DC, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, etc. can't manage to provide basic public services like police protection and education, while filled with people who want to spend money on people they can't help across the globe is, well, it says something about humanity. Maybe after a few hours playing with a kitten I could think of something it says that isn't so negative.
Prof Andrew Huberman on the neuroscience of gratitude says it isn't cultivating the feeling of
gratitude in one self per se which has the health giving beneficial effects, it is actually being on the receiving end of gratitude or observing someone receiving gratitude which gives all the positive effects/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVjfFN89qvQ
"That’s why so much corporate work is so unsatisfying, too; if you can wonder “would anyone notice if I stopped doing this?” you have already passed the feeling useless horizon."
That, right there, is the essence of Graeber's 'bullshit jobs' phenomenon (probably more succinctly than Graeber himself articulated it).
Nailed it. The same logic that tells people they are fighting systemic racism by burning down the stores in black neighborhoods tells people they need to censor those who question vaccine efficacy, tells people they need to send money to feed the world, tells people they need to vote to make sure some underprivileged person somewhere gets something for it... all that relies on the initial dopamine hit of "Boy, aren't I a good fellow, doing these good things?" and relies more on the yawning abyss of feeling that opens up afterwards as your brain responds "you have done nothing." Like all addictions, they aren't chasing the high, they are fleeing from the low.
Why are most NGOS and non-profits leftist? There's your answer.
(I feel like I should be citing someone on that point... am I forgetting some notable author that wrote on why non-profits are leftist? Walter Williams or Thomas Sowell perhaps?
I wonder if there is a negative feedback loop here. See if this makes sense:
1) Life gets easier + government gets more paternalistic = people are less incentivized to make hard choices and exercise discretion and do what they think is right/reasonable/just/merciful (i.e., "good"). There is less need to exercise discretion because the potential for really negative consequences is decreasing as a result of technology, plentitude, and government safety nets. The need for rules and norms to correspond to actual positive consequences, thereby functioning as useful heuristics for guiding "good" conduct, decreases.
2) People have less ability to exercise discretion to do the right thing or the reasonable thing or the just thing or the merciful thing, and thus they have less practice determining whether the outcomes of their actions were good, so it's hard for them to tell what actions are good, so they increasingly need government/blue checks/media to tell them what is right and what is wrong (following rules = good person, rather than getting good at making good choices = good person). Demand is met; more arbitrary norms and rules follow.
3) People fully lose their sense of agency and utility, and increasingly look to adherence to these arbitrary norms and rules (or signaling of adherence to them) to derive their sense of personal worth, while at the same time losing the ability to see that the rules are arbitrary, while increasingly needing more rules to follow. Smugness and self-satisfaction derived from cost-free, arbitrary virtue-signaling of rule-following replaces the sense of satisfaction (and positive reinforcement) that would otherwise have been derived from the positive feedback (e.g., gratitude) that people used to receive from those close to them when they did a good thing.
By the time step 3 is reached, people have absolute moral license to be as bad/unreasonable/unjust/unmerciful as they want to be, as long as they have performed the arbitrary purification rituals at the altar of the current thing along the way. A person can call for physical violence against someone they've never met, with little to no justification, as long as they have a blue and yellow flag on their profile, or put a mask on their kid, or drive a Prius, or have an "In this house we believe" sign in their front yard (or, for the opposite side of the spectrum, have an NRA bumper sticker, go to church on Sundays, fly a Trump flag, etc.)
Maybe this comment is just a restatement of the "bad times --> strong men --> good times --> weak men --> bad times..." meme.
Yeah, there is definitely a cognitive dissonance or a paradoxical nature to nearly everything. I have to act in a way that leads to or is likely to lead to certain "good" results, but I have to refrain from debauching myself once the "good" results accrue to me. Similarly, we as a civilization should develop norms that encourage benefits to accrue, but also develop norms that discourage debauching ourselves on the benefits that do accrue.
That's why I have this sense that practicing discretion is so very important.
I think this describes a different dynamic, and a true one. Both Smith and Aristotle make a point that virtue is something that must be practiced, and just following rules is a very weak alternative.
All civilizations have had bouts of decadence disease after getting too successful, but I think modern civs (and Rome) both hosed things up by emphasizing the paternalistic/bad choice enabling government. The middle and lower classes have often served as as reserve of good sense when the upper classes get silly, as the poor especially don't have the kind of cushion that allows them to forego virtue entirely, and the middle classes don't want to screw up and become poor and so don't take on all the vices of the rich. We managed to ensure the poor and lower classes needed no virtue, and were in fact encouraged to not have any, and the middle class has squeezed into either being closer to the poor or the striver managerial class.
I think largely by not removing all the terrors of poverty. Maurico Miller talked about that a lot on Econtalk about his book The Alternative (https://www.thealternativebook.org/). The quote that really stuck with me was that we (gov programs) make poverty more comfortable but not more escapable. I take that to mean that it saps one's drive to escape poverty, disincentivizing work and thrift, along with the other virtues the poor clearly lack. (In fact, it often seems to me that the very poor often imitate the rich, down to the same vices.) Much like how people who are in bad situations deal with it by porn, video games and drugs/alcohol instead of fixing the underlying situation, the poor are helped in such a way as to make them numb to their circumstances to some extent, but that numbness keeps them from developing the virtue to correct it.
Put another way, diabetics have a big problem due to losing feeling in their extremities like their feet. It isn't a problem because they loved foot rubs, but because if they cut their foot (or just get an awful blister) they don't realize the problem and wind up getting horrific infections. Lack of pain in a fine situation is good, but lack of pain in a bad situation merely covers up the signals that you need to get out.
Finitimi maxime. Neighbors especially.
Local action is most important. It should be a crime to send philanthropic money (or any kind if my extremism is allowed to interject) further than 300 miles from your county line, and cost a percentage for every 50 miles it goes past it.
Sometimes the location in question bans it. I remember a talk by David Schmidtz of University of Arizona about a trip he took to Africa, and how one village (county?) had a sign that said something like "No foreign clothing". He couldn't understand why, and was taken the next day to talk to people. Apparently the village had once had a pretty thriving clothing industry, then one day some Western do gooders dropped a container or two of used cloths off. That pretty much killed the industry, as everyone had lots of free clothing; all the businesses left for other places. Normally, hey, that'd be alright because now people could do other things and just get free cloths! Except there weren't anymore free cloths. Those two containers were it, and after a few years people needed to buy clothing again and... whoops. Now they were worse off because they had to travel rather far to the next region (apparently too far to bother setting up a supply line for a shop locally?) So they lost their local industry and didn't even gain a source of low cost clothing. (That's the short, "I remember this from 8 years ago" version.) (Edit: forgot to clarify, "So they banned charitable donations of clothing, and all clothing that wasn't to sell or personally owned.")
He also related that he was pretty upset about the whole thing, and was tearing up a bit in front of the old ladies explaining all this to him. He asked what [we Americans] could do that would actually help, since so many people wanted to and apparently we just keep hurting them instead. They took him seriously, thought for a few moments and said "We really like those plastic water [milk] jugs you guys make. Very handy for carrying back and forth to the well, and we can't make anything like that here." Needless to say, I have yet to see any charitable organizations trying to raise money to collect empty gallon water bottles and ship them to Africa. It probably just doesn't have the same high minded feel to it, more's the pity.
E. Michael Jones talks about this same thing when he speaks about his book about Tanzania and it's leader Julius Nerere.
How he outlines it is that (((rag-pickers))) here in the states collect used clothing and send overseas for "charity" to scalp tons of money that is available via US grants and programs. These clothes ruin local industry. The same thing happens with food as thousands of tons of rice and such are sent over, decimating local farming as there is no way to compete with free crap. It keeps the continent destitute and supplies a never ending pipeline of virtue that unthinking, unaffected urban sorts can suckle off of to feel good about themselves in some minute way.
EMJ also relays how most of the strongest economies in history all started with their own textile manufacturing and the peripheral industries of the same. It's skilled labor and there is always demand, humans NEED clothing. England had wool, Florence made it into finery and goofy berets and got rich. America supplied much of Europe with cotton. China makes essentially all of the worlds clothing now and look how they are doing these days. Of course, once each of these cultures moved from production and manufacturing to banking is when the declines began. But that is my own aside and a topic for another time.
Africans being shut out of developing such primordial industries and economies as agriculture and textiles of their own via "charity-so-called" is what does the most damage to that continent.
Clothing is a very visible aspect of culture too, so when that is taken away or prevented, and everyone is pretty much wearing dirty old Rolling Stones t-shirts, the bonds of greater societies break down and eventually it rolls back into tribes of mercenaries looking to subsist by carrying out the exploitative whims of foreign interests.
Interestingly, China has stopped doing much of the lower end textile work, with it moving down towards Malaysia, Sri Lanka and in some cases African countries. It is interesting to look at the labels of cloths over the decades and see how it shifts from Japan to Taiwan/HongKong, then China, now the farther SE Asian countries. As you say, it becomes pretty technical work after a while, and the workers start getting more valuable in other industries. It is funny to think that Toyota used to make cloth...
Between the governments of African nations and other countries trying to help and failing so hard, it is difficult to judge which is doing the most harm.
Fair enough on the final point. All these things shift freely and quickly between the categories of cause and effect when the scale is large enough and depending on the context.
I've learned to be skeptical of folks whose high-minded moral concern is always directed at people and events halfway around the world. Usually such people are douchebags to the people they actually interact with in person. Poor huddled masses starving in some third-world country are easy to love as an abtraction; none of the nuance or human shortcomings that you have to deal with if you're helping someone closer to home. Kinda like the DC and NYC politicians who love illegal immigrants...until they start showing up in their own cities by the thousands.
Hah! That is exactly where my mind went by the end of your first sentence :D
The fact that DC, NYC, Philly, Baltimore, etc. can't manage to provide basic public services like police protection and education, while filled with people who want to spend money on people they can't help across the globe is, well, it says something about humanity. Maybe after a few hours playing with a kitten I could think of something it says that isn't so negative.
Yeah, Chris Bray has some hilarious, but sad, stories on his substack ("Tell Me How This Ends") about the city council of the town where he lives not being able to pass a budget for a couple years, but they have time to pass resolutions condemning Vladimir Putin for invading Ukraine. I don't know if you read him regularly, but here's one such gem: https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/the-blue-model-a-recipe-for-ruin?r=sow8t&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=direct
Prof Andrew Huberman on the neuroscience of gratitude says it isn't cultivating the feeling of
gratitude in one self per se which has the health giving beneficial effects, it is actually being on the receiving end of gratitude or observing someone receiving gratitude which gives all the positive effects/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVjfFN89qvQ