2023, agency, and the importance of perspective

 I tend to write posts about a year in retrospect.  The ritual is as silly as many such rituals.  A year is marked arbitrarily.  We select revolutions around the sun as a vital timekeeper when we could ignore that in favor of others.  The specific day we choose to start the new year is completely arbitrary.  Shift that by a few months, and one could write very different stories about many "years" as the events within a "year" change by accounting gimmickry.  I don't celebrate my birthday, and have not done so in decades.  Holidays, I do for others, but there is something worth while in noting past events and thinking about what has happened, and hence what may happen.  What does happen.  What will happen.  I cannot say that the events of 2023, those that occurred on a national or global scale between January 1, 2023 and today, December 31, 2023 were, when taken together, net good.  I mean, there are still some hours left as I type away, and the stock market did well, so I made fuckloads of money.  There's that, and I can't really complain about making fuckloads of money, to the degree that money matters, and it does, but anyone who values money beyond all has misplaced priorities.  The reason I have what I do is that my needs are, truthfully, minimal.  Beyond Diogenes of Sinope and Epictetus and Musonius Rufus, I'll grant, but I can be happy with so much less.  Could I even begin to write retrospectively about the national and global events of 2023?  Not comprehensively.  Many of these events are deeply troubling.

And so I write, perhaps more briefly than in many such essays, about the role of agency amid global insecurity.  National political chaos and global events can overwhelm, yet they do so here, from a distance.  The effect is as follows.  If you do not put a check on how you consume information, you react as though your very life is at stake.  Your own endocrine system reacts as though you were facing the same stressors as those in the worst situations when you almost certainly are not.

What is most important is agency.  I am relatively unconcerned with those who have "more" than their efforts would provide under a pure meritocracy.  Dumb luck, lucky them, what's it to me, who cares?  If you have a mindset in which you get angry about that, you will have a hard time in life, and that will also direct you to some very destructive political ideologies.

The problem is when there are those who receive less than their efforts would merit, either economically or jurisprudentially or conflictually.  The best we can do in designing rules is to reduce these adverse outcomes as much as possible, which is not the same thing as reducing poverty as much as possible.  To observe poverty is not to observe an adverse outcome in which a "system" has allocated less than effort would merit.  It might indicate that, but that is not a necessary implication.

America has done a pretty good job of reducing adverse outcomes.  Are there gaps?  Yes.  Room for improvement?  As long as it is cautious.  Yet, I am grateful for the opportunities I have had.

And in perspective, one notes the genius of the following.  Limited government means that even as our national politics devolve into a shitstorm of crazy, and a whirlwind of chaos, the minimal reach of government insulates the populace from that shitstorm.

I am a political independent, with minimal ideology at this point.  I have jokingly proposed "the Econ 101 Party," and I remain committed to the bare bones principles of classical liberalism in the John Stuart Mill tradition, along with Burkean principles of caution from classical conservatism, which is no contradiction, but beyond that, I allow uncertainty and minimal policy commitments.  The Republican Party is an authoritarian personality cult built around one of the worst human beings in the history of American politics, and the Democratic Party is devoted to identitarian insanity, which reifies every bigotry that it claims to fight, rejects fixed morality or personal responsibility, and cannot govern.

Take your pick of major American political news stories from 2023, and most can be explained with this framework, which also explains my alienation from major political institutions.

And yet, consider your level of agency.  The genius of the structure is that you retain it.  The danger that lies ahead is that any of these fuckwits will chip away at the rules such that you may no longer live your life indifferent to the political shitstorm, and I cannot say with any certainty how likely that is.  Get it?  I cannot say with any certainty?  "Likely?"  Probability joke.

[Ducks rotten fruit.]

Yesterday, though, I wrote of Malthusianism.  Might one make an analogy to the prediction of doom, always around the corner?

Do your work, save and invest, and the likelihood of your success remains quite high.  That's "agency."  To quote Trey and Matt, "America, fuck yeah."

Globally, what touches us is less direct still, yet the picture is more troubling.  In some ways, by some numbers.  The worst problems, generally speaking, are in places with dysfunctional cultures.  Andrew Breitbart was a lying shit, but like many bad people, he occasionally had a good line.  Yesterday, I quoted John Bolton, and today, I quote Andrew Breitbart.  Maybe next week, I'll quote Ted Bundy.  Anyway, "politics is downstream of culture."  Just because the guy who said it was a terrible person doesn't make it wrong.

The places that don't work, mostly, have dysfunctional cultures.  More and more, Samuel Huntington seems to have had it right at the international level, but even at the national level, look at the places with dysfunction.  What do they have in common?

Leftism has a framework that they want you to use.  Postcolonialism.  It works like this.  You know that game, rock-paper-scissors?  You play to determine who gets a thing.  One kid loses the first round, and then says, "best two out of three."  He loses that round and says, "best three out of five."  It continues, potentially indefinitely.

Postcolonialism is that.

For any non-white/non-European country, what is its state of economic development and political chaos?  If it is fine, ignore it, it's not part of your data set.  If there are problems, go back x years.  Have you found any involvement by white, Europeans who might, by any stretch, be called "colonialists?"  If yes, blame them, and "colonialism."  If no, go back x more years.  Lather, rinse, repeat until you find white Europeans.  If you have to go back centuries, do that.  Then STOP.  However far you have to go back, that's how far you go back, because any and all problems in a non-white, non-European country must be blamed on white, European colonialism, no matter how many centuries you have to go back to construct that argument.

Even within a country, apply the same method.

If you have any commitment to the scientific method, or even just not being a snotty, little child, you reject the entire enterprise, but alas, much of academia, many of our youths, and much of the world are committed to this lunacy.

And yet, culture is the very definition of "endogenous."  You are not just a part of your culture, you create it by being.  We, here, are a part of and creators of our culture, or subculture, or however we calculate it.  America is culturally diverse, with all that that implies.  Most countries are not, and as basic, empirical points, a) America is fucking awesome, and b) most of those non-diverse countries are shitty places to live with shitty economies, repressive governments and repressive cultures, which strikes me as potentially interconnected.

To quote Trey and Matt again, "America, fuck yeah."

Is there something wrong with the cultures?

I'm gonna say that the data seem suggestive.  Yet, it is your choice to act according to your culture.  The more culturally homogenous your country is, the more pressure there is to behave according to cultural norms, but some of those norms, and indeed the laws that follow from them, are deeply destructive, or at least inhibiting to progress.

The Enlightenment worked, and works.  A lot of systems don't.

Maybe it isn't postcolonial legacies of roshambo, but toxic, inhibiting and destructive cultures that take away the agency within those countries.

And that is saddening.  Yet it is also not a problem that I can solve, nor you.

What is more distressing is when that madness is turned outward.

The opportunities provided by this country are awe-inspiring, and the fact that they persist even amid whirling shitstorms of political chaos demonstrates the brilliance of a design that has endured.  I hope it continues to endure, amid the greatest challenges it has faced since the mid-19th Century.  A Civil War is not going to happen, but there are real challenges, amid which you still have agency, which is my very point.  Amid all of the lunacy, that is the point.

Around the world, the biggest problems remain those that we could solve, were we so inclined.  Water sanitation.  Malaria.  These are economically solvable by charity-minded people with the money.  Alas, an insufficient number care.  The world, though, is being bitten in the ass by Samuel Huntington's ghost, within which is still the observation that you make choices, we make choices, everyone makes choices, and the flip side of agency is responsibility.

Some cultures do not work, cannot work, and will never work, and the postmodern, anti-scientific ideology of postcolonialism is a selective refusal to grapple with the implications of these observations.  Adherents to destructive belief systems by definition destroy, including themselves.

Instead, build.

Dave Alvin, "Out of Control," live.  Dave is about as good as it gets for straight-up rock & roll.