This is a truly remarkable essay. Astonishing, even. I'm sure I'll still be thinking about this argument years from now. There have only been a few times in the past where I read something that instantly illuminated some hitherto dark corner of our collective psychology, and this was one of them. Thanks so much for writing it, Ruxandra.
The internal/external locus of control has been picked up before as being a part of the psychology of leftism, along with several psychological disorders. Believing that your life is just a sequence of events managed by the gods is surely comforting for the weak, but it also neutralizes those who could have been strong and creates a lot of dysfunctional behaviors (in the limit, it creates things like child sacrifice). Even basic things like personal hygiene don't make sense if you view epidemics as a random dice roll from the heavens. And I doubt you can mount the kind of intensity and long term planning capacity we see in men like Elon Musk if your culture thinks outcomes are already decided by fate. It's surely not a coincidence that after millennia of stagnation capital-p Progress kicked off only once people became secular.
I don't cover the equality drive (which is a weakness of the essay), but do argue that a lot of modern far left behavior that looks irrational would have been rational in the tribal world we evolved in. For example, tribal gods aren't concerned with honesty at all. It isn't until the start of proper trade networks around ancient Egyptian times that we begin to see gods who punish dishonesty in the afterlife. Tribal gods are however very concerned with the accurate following of ritual. This makes sense: ancient tribes are at the mercy of many forces they don't understand and can't control like weather, tectonic activity, volcanoes, the luck of the hunt. A very external locus of control is just realistic and probably required for keeping morale up, but that forces them to encode learned knowledge as rituals supplied by the gods. It can't be, "I figured out how to make manioc edible, follow my instructions and you will survive", it has to be "the holy ritual has these steps and the gods will punish you if you don't follow their instructions". As civilization and consciousness develop we start to see human knowledge and agency become more important, and the gods start penalizing low-agency behaviors like child sacrifice.
So many big questions posed by this. The biggest being, what to do about it?
It's possible that there is just no solution here. Reassuring the weak / benefiting from the efforts of the strong seem to be fundamentally in tension. The more your culture validates being a loser, the less motivation there is to stop being a loser. E.g. fat shaming is a healthy social behavior because being fat is bad for people; if such people view their condition as outside their control (it's the evil food corporations that did it to me!) then they can't take the necessary steps to become healthier.
So perhaps the best way to view it is that the healthiest society is one that creates enough opportunities for everyone to 'win' on their own terms, to win social status via activities that are hard to lose at. Our society has many such mechanisms already. The huge praise given to jobs for which there's unlimited demand, like entertainers, is just one of those. The prevalence of "fake email jobs" might be another. It becomes an optimization problem. Can society generate so many roles at which it's impossible to lose that everyone can feel self respect and like they have a place in the world, without diverting too many resources away from the strong who genuinely push things forward?
Thank you, that's very kind! (I also found it funny how you said it's not my usual fare).
Regarding the Elon Musk observation. I wanted to include in the essay that the modern world is variance maximizing. The flip side to responsibility for failure is attribution of success also to the individual. And a sense that there's nobody above the individual? Maybe that's why we seek to bring down powerful individuals. It's unwise to defer to one human in all things and in the absence of a metaphysics that places something higher above man, we are left uncovered and unable to articulate why we should not listen to this uber succesfull human being in all matters?
Most don't try and bring down successful individuals. I'd guess only about 25% of the population have this kind of equalitarian quasi-tribal instinct, and the rest don't think about "captains of industry" much at all. And when they do they have respect for their achievements.
This becomes clearer when we look at the targets. A lot of the hate towards successful individuals is restricted to merchants, which is probably a result of zero sum thinking (something adaptive in tribal societies and which I _do_ address in my essay). If you look at highly successful individuals who aren't traders or industrialists then the disrespect vanishes even on the left, and their success is celebrated by all. A good example would be Taylor Swift. People have an easier time understanding why she's successful, and so she doesn't get ideological hatred in the same way rich CEOs do. Even people who are really down on their luck don't feel resentment towards rich actors or pop stars.
Beautiful essay, though an obsession with equality and opposition to hierarchy is conventionally thought to be common in small-scale, traditional (and presumably religious) societies.
Maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong, but smaller scale societies (bands and tribes) are thought to abjure significant differences in resources or status. (The existence of gender hierarchy is contested.)
you mean hunter gatherers? I think it's hard for me to go back that far, but here I'm tracing how people deal with these things now vs say medieval times?
Yes, hunter-gatherers, but the thought was that if equality mattered so much for 290,000+ years of human history, then maybe its prominence now isn't explained by disenchantment in a secular age.
Then again, maybe you're inviting us to think that Christianity suppressed the obsession with equality and now it's returning.
Oh, I totally believe that the instinct for Equality is innate in the human species (but so is "admiration for the strong" or "hierarchy").
I think the question is why in different eras these instincts seem to take different relative intensities and emerge in different formats. The way I model this is that it's a mix of individual psychology and background culture (e.g. even today conservatives, who are also likely to have certain psychological traits, are less likely to be pro-equality)
Thought provoking, excellent essay. Made me think of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor who tells Jesus that freedom, i.,e., individual agency, is unsupportable for Man.
Ha! I really like the Grand Inquisitor. But haven't thought abt it this way. To me it was mostly about materialist & safe (bread) versus risky & spiritual. I guess there's a safe and spiritual vision I'm painting here and maybe the Grand Inquisitor included that
I thought of it because the GI blames Jesus for rejecting mystery and authority as well as bread. Turn the other cheek, etc. is a hard, perhaps impossible ethic to follow as an individual without authority.
This was an excellent post, Ruxandra. I agree with everything it says. I just feel... I don't know what we can do with this? Like, I feel equality as a societal goal and the be-all-end-all of morality is a terrible path which has shown time and again that it leads to bad outcomes, but I can see how a more liberal, 'freedom, agency and work/success' path really has little to offer to lots of people. Myself, I tend to find a lot of meaning in truth-seeking, intellectual and aesthetic self-cultivation and a level of aurea mediocritas well-being in work and personal relationships, so I don't fall into either the old or the new of these dichotomies. But I can imagine my own path is as unlikely to be satisfactory to most people as the secular liberal one.
Yes, I can see how you could model that, i.e., just as in the Roman Empire you had elites which were mostly atheistic, a dead, official religion that just required going through the motions and new religious movements, the Mystery Religions, expanding among the plebs and one of them eventually conquering the elite. But I just feel this isn't replicable any more. The world has become very deeply secularized. I just fail to see how religious dogma and any specific religion could do such a memetic and ideological recapture of most society (and it won't work if just the poor go for it).
There's potential perhaps to design a religion instead of hoping one will evolve. A few years ago I was quite into this idea and even made a few attempts but didn't get very far.
> Perhaps not coincidentally, the most intentionally mass-scale genocidal regimes took shape once the world had largely lost its confidence in God.
Well... the very same cultural developments (i.e., science and the Enlightenment) that precipitated secularism also enabled the industrial means of mass genocide. They share a common cause, rather than one begetting the other. In fact, my understanding is that the ancient DNA evidence paints a picture of widespread and frequent genocidal collisions between ethnic groups in Europe, stretching back before the Bronze Age, often in the form of eradicating the enemy males and abducting/absorbing their females. I don't think you can pin the impulse itself on the loss of confidence in God; perhaps, at most, our expanded means.
Maybe. I need to study this more (which is why I said perhaps) but I think I’ve read arguments suggesting that the regimes of the 20th century were uniquely intentional and different in nature from previous war efforts. I guess it's very hard to say how much of it was “ideological” versus “we can do this now”
For Heaven’s sake, repent and believe in The Gospel. Some impediments to sexual gratification are a small price to pay to be able to move back into a world that is full of meaning, beauty, and ultimately that peace which surpasses all understanding. I feel sorry for all you ultra moderns who are willing to pay any metaphysical price for more sex.
> in Canudos, each person occupies a place, and that place, however lowly, is intelligible within a sacred whole.
Frank Herbert in Dune, describing the social order of the Imperium, nicely sums this kind of arrangement in a single motto: "A place for every man and every man in his place."
A wonderfully lucid and moving exploration of a phenomenon which is much more prevalent than imagined. To put it in blunter terms what does the individual or collective do when faced with its own inadequacy to compete in a relentlessly competitive world. At the individual level it can often result in actual suicide or in suicidal crime. At the collective level it leads to behaviour which brings about its own obliteration, as in Iran. Or citizens in the lowest ranks in democracies voting for vicious incompetents and criminals who pay lip service to their humanity instead of for those offering them the chance to enter the impersonal world of striving and achievement, for which they feel (probably correctly) wholly inadequate. A phenomenon seen often in Africa
>Perhaps not coincidentally, the most intentionally mass-scale genocidal regimes took shape once the world had largely lost its confidence in God.
I think this is profoundly false.
First mass-scale intentional genocide is, perhaps, the Albigensian Crusade with principle "Kill them all; let God sort them out." People may say that we have no evidence that such phrase was actually used during the crusade, but the reason why we know about it at all it because it was used by Catholic preachers as an example of moral behavior.
Nazis and Imperial Japanese were as far from "disenchanted" as it goes.
This is a truly remarkable essay. Astonishing, even. I'm sure I'll still be thinking about this argument years from now. There have only been a few times in the past where I read something that instantly illuminated some hitherto dark corner of our collective psychology, and this was one of them. Thanks so much for writing it, Ruxandra.
The internal/external locus of control has been picked up before as being a part of the psychology of leftism, along with several psychological disorders. Believing that your life is just a sequence of events managed by the gods is surely comforting for the weak, but it also neutralizes those who could have been strong and creates a lot of dysfunctional behaviors (in the limit, it creates things like child sacrifice). Even basic things like personal hygiene don't make sense if you view epidemics as a random dice roll from the heavens. And I doubt you can mount the kind of intensity and long term planning capacity we see in men like Elon Musk if your culture thinks outcomes are already decided by fate. It's surely not a coincidence that after millennia of stagnation capital-p Progress kicked off only once people became secular.
There are some connections here to my own most recent essay, "Leftism is just ancient instincts". https://penbroke.substack.com/p/leftist-behavior-is-just-ancient
I don't cover the equality drive (which is a weakness of the essay), but do argue that a lot of modern far left behavior that looks irrational would have been rational in the tribal world we evolved in. For example, tribal gods aren't concerned with honesty at all. It isn't until the start of proper trade networks around ancient Egyptian times that we begin to see gods who punish dishonesty in the afterlife. Tribal gods are however very concerned with the accurate following of ritual. This makes sense: ancient tribes are at the mercy of many forces they don't understand and can't control like weather, tectonic activity, volcanoes, the luck of the hunt. A very external locus of control is just realistic and probably required for keeping morale up, but that forces them to encode learned knowledge as rituals supplied by the gods. It can't be, "I figured out how to make manioc edible, follow my instructions and you will survive", it has to be "the holy ritual has these steps and the gods will punish you if you don't follow their instructions". As civilization and consciousness develop we start to see human knowledge and agency become more important, and the gods start penalizing low-agency behaviors like child sacrifice.
So many big questions posed by this. The biggest being, what to do about it?
It's possible that there is just no solution here. Reassuring the weak / benefiting from the efforts of the strong seem to be fundamentally in tension. The more your culture validates being a loser, the less motivation there is to stop being a loser. E.g. fat shaming is a healthy social behavior because being fat is bad for people; if such people view their condition as outside their control (it's the evil food corporations that did it to me!) then they can't take the necessary steps to become healthier.
So perhaps the best way to view it is that the healthiest society is one that creates enough opportunities for everyone to 'win' on their own terms, to win social status via activities that are hard to lose at. Our society has many such mechanisms already. The huge praise given to jobs for which there's unlimited demand, like entertainers, is just one of those. The prevalence of "fake email jobs" might be another. It becomes an optimization problem. Can society generate so many roles at which it's impossible to lose that everyone can feel self respect and like they have a place in the world, without diverting too many resources away from the strong who genuinely push things forward?
Thank you, that's very kind! (I also found it funny how you said it's not my usual fare).
Regarding the Elon Musk observation. I wanted to include in the essay that the modern world is variance maximizing. The flip side to responsibility for failure is attribution of success also to the individual. And a sense that there's nobody above the individual? Maybe that's why we seek to bring down powerful individuals. It's unwise to defer to one human in all things and in the absence of a metaphysics that places something higher above man, we are left uncovered and unable to articulate why we should not listen to this uber succesfull human being in all matters?
Most don't try and bring down successful individuals. I'd guess only about 25% of the population have this kind of equalitarian quasi-tribal instinct, and the rest don't think about "captains of industry" much at all. And when they do they have respect for their achievements.
This becomes clearer when we look at the targets. A lot of the hate towards successful individuals is restricted to merchants, which is probably a result of zero sum thinking (something adaptive in tribal societies and which I _do_ address in my essay). If you look at highly successful individuals who aren't traders or industrialists then the disrespect vanishes even on the left, and their success is celebrated by all. A good example would be Taylor Swift. People have an easier time understanding why she's successful, and so she doesn't get ideological hatred in the same way rich CEOs do. Even people who are really down on their luck don't feel resentment towards rich actors or pop stars.
Beautiful essay, though an obsession with equality and opposition to hierarchy is conventionally thought to be common in small-scale, traditional (and presumably religious) societies.
my understanding is that it's more about fitting into one's place and not being out of step? Weren't traditional societies quite hierarchical?
Maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong, but smaller scale societies (bands and tribes) are thought to abjure significant differences in resources or status. (The existence of gender hierarchy is contested.)
you mean hunter gatherers? I think it's hard for me to go back that far, but here I'm tracing how people deal with these things now vs say medieval times?
I think in a medieval society, peasants were quite hierarchically structured?
Yes, hunter-gatherers, but the thought was that if equality mattered so much for 290,000+ years of human history, then maybe its prominence now isn't explained by disenchantment in a secular age.
Then again, maybe you're inviting us to think that Christianity suppressed the obsession with equality and now it's returning.
Oh, I totally believe that the instinct for Equality is innate in the human species (but so is "admiration for the strong" or "hierarchy").
I think the question is why in different eras these instincts seem to take different relative intensities and emerge in different formats. The way I model this is that it's a mix of individual psychology and background culture (e.g. even today conservatives, who are also likely to have certain psychological traits, are less likely to be pro-equality)
Thought provoking, excellent essay. Made me think of Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor who tells Jesus that freedom, i.,e., individual agency, is unsupportable for Man.
Ha! I really like the Grand Inquisitor. But haven't thought abt it this way. To me it was mostly about materialist & safe (bread) versus risky & spiritual. I guess there's a safe and spiritual vision I'm painting here and maybe the Grand Inquisitor included that
I thought of it because the GI blames Jesus for rejecting mystery and authority as well as bread. Turn the other cheek, etc. is a hard, perhaps impossible ethic to follow as an individual without authority.
This was an excellent post, Ruxandra. I agree with everything it says. I just feel... I don't know what we can do with this? Like, I feel equality as a societal goal and the be-all-end-all of morality is a terrible path which has shown time and again that it leads to bad outcomes, but I can see how a more liberal, 'freedom, agency and work/success' path really has little to offer to lots of people. Myself, I tend to find a lot of meaning in truth-seeking, intellectual and aesthetic self-cultivation and a level of aurea mediocritas well-being in work and personal relationships, so I don't fall into either the old or the new of these dichotomies. But I can imagine my own path is as unlikely to be satisfactory to most people as the secular liberal one.
Thank you!
Well, I don’t have a good answer myself, which is part of why I didn’t want to write this at first. Yet it does seem like it needs to be said?
To me it seems like maybe religion is the answer?
but this is very tentative
Yes, I can see how you could model that, i.e., just as in the Roman Empire you had elites which were mostly atheistic, a dead, official religion that just required going through the motions and new religious movements, the Mystery Religions, expanding among the plebs and one of them eventually conquering the elite. But I just feel this isn't replicable any more. The world has become very deeply secularized. I just fail to see how religious dogma and any specific religion could do such a memetic and ideological recapture of most society (and it won't work if just the poor go for it).
Yes I think you're probably right :( Not sure. I know it sounds cringe and sterile but... recreate community?
There's potential perhaps to design a religion instead of hoping one will evolve. A few years ago I was quite into this idea and even made a few attempts but didn't get very far.
> Perhaps not coincidentally, the most intentionally mass-scale genocidal regimes took shape once the world had largely lost its confidence in God.
Well... the very same cultural developments (i.e., science and the Enlightenment) that precipitated secularism also enabled the industrial means of mass genocide. They share a common cause, rather than one begetting the other. In fact, my understanding is that the ancient DNA evidence paints a picture of widespread and frequent genocidal collisions between ethnic groups in Europe, stretching back before the Bronze Age, often in the form of eradicating the enemy males and abducting/absorbing their females. I don't think you can pin the impulse itself on the loss of confidence in God; perhaps, at most, our expanded means.
Maybe. I need to study this more (which is why I said perhaps) but I think I’ve read arguments suggesting that the regimes of the 20th century were uniquely intentional and different in nature from previous war efforts. I guess it's very hard to say how much of it was “ideological” versus “we can do this now”
For Heaven’s sake, repent and believe in The Gospel. Some impediments to sexual gratification are a small price to pay to be able to move back into a world that is full of meaning, beauty, and ultimately that peace which surpasses all understanding. I feel sorry for all you ultra moderns who are willing to pay any metaphysical price for more sex.
How does this relate to my essay?
> in Canudos, each person occupies a place, and that place, however lowly, is intelligible within a sacred whole.
Frank Herbert in Dune, describing the social order of the Imperium, nicely sums this kind of arrangement in a single motto: "A place for every man and every man in his place."
good quote
A wonderfully lucid and moving exploration of a phenomenon which is much more prevalent than imagined. To put it in blunter terms what does the individual or collective do when faced with its own inadequacy to compete in a relentlessly competitive world. At the individual level it can often result in actual suicide or in suicidal crime. At the collective level it leads to behaviour which brings about its own obliteration, as in Iran. Or citizens in the lowest ranks in democracies voting for vicious incompetents and criminals who pay lip service to their humanity instead of for those offering them the chance to enter the impersonal world of striving and achievement, for which they feel (probably correctly) wholly inadequate. A phenomenon seen often in Africa
>Perhaps not coincidentally, the most intentionally mass-scale genocidal regimes took shape once the world had largely lost its confidence in God.
I think this is profoundly false.
First mass-scale intentional genocide is, perhaps, the Albigensian Crusade with principle "Kill them all; let God sort them out." People may say that we have no evidence that such phrase was actually used during the crusade, but the reason why we know about it at all it because it was used by Catholic preachers as an example of moral behavior.
Nazis and Imperial Japanese were as far from "disenchanted" as it goes.