More from a recovering liberal
Here’s more from former liberal (and present Berkeley therapist) “Robin” at American Thinker. She discusses all you ever wanted to know about her transformation and were unafraid to ask.
And I was amused by the following from a commenter, as well:
Aren’t most conservatives former liberals to some extent? All children are liberals. They are naive, selfish, and believe the world works the way they want it to work. They throw tantrums and blame everything on someone else. They think being a kid is cool and adults are uncool.
Many of the commenters here, myself included, are apostates from the liberal flock.
I hope and pray that more people will have a political and spiritual “Road to Damascus”. I suggest we all reacquaint ourselves with the writings of Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, The Founding Fathers, The Federalist Papers, Lincoln, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, and the Bible. Knowledge is power.
There’s magical thinking, too, defined in one online medical dictionary as the “irrational belief that one can bring about a circumstance or event by thinking about it or wishing for it; normal in preschool children, it also occurs in schizophrenia.”
http://tinyurl.com/plrf2z
I remember this as characteristic of some of my own thinking in my not-so-distant liberal past — if only enough people really believed that war or hunger could be eradicated, then it would be; if only we believed that our enemies were kind and rational beings and treated them accordingly, then they would magically become susceptible to reason and stop wanting to kill us . . . now, of course, it reminds me of Tinkerbell, but then, wasn’t it pretty to think so?
I am afraid that the circumstances of our modern lives contribute heavily to such magical thinking. After all, magic is all around us. All I need to do is type in this little box and magically, in moments, people all over the place will be able to read my words. I’ve got this box in my living room that connects me to the minds of other human beings all over the world, without even any wires attaching it to the wall. Touch some buttons on that box and in a split second, I can find my long-lost best friend from elementary school, look up the definition of any word, find out almost anything I want to know. Another little wireless box in my purse, with the touch of some more buttons, will magically find my children and summon up their voices no matter where they may be, indoors or out, nearby or on the other side of the Atlantic. Not so long ago my husband, standing on a remote mountain trail in a snowstorm in the Rockies, conducted a conversation about a sick cow with his farm employee in New York. If I am sick, my doctor uses mysterious boxes and rays to summon up detailed views of my innards, and then treats me with innocuous-looking magic pills that, more often than not, make me well again in days. The microwave makes my coffee hot in moments, airplanes don’t fall out of the sky for reasons I only dimly understand, satellites beam radio signals I can’t see to my TV so that I can watch the baseball game in Boston and to the radio in my car so that I can listen to Beethoven from San Francisco, and for that matter, what makes my car go, anyway? I barely grasp even that, and it’s mechanical and visible, not intangible like so many of the more recent technological marvels.
Many or most of us have only the haziest understanding of the science behind the astounding phenomena that surround us daily. If all I have to do is touch a button here and there to summon up all of this and more, why shouldn’t I believe that all I have to do to perfect the world is to wish that it were so?
…and there’s the well known saying:
“If you aren’t a liberal when you are young, you have no heart. If you aren’t a conservative when you are old, you have no brain.”
Mrs Whatsit: Here’s a post that’s relevant to your point, I think.
Has anyone here ever met someone who (as an adult) underwent the opposite transformation, from conservative to liberal? I haven’t, myself.
In a recent article by Gagdad Bob (I think you may have linked it, Neo), there was some discussion that collectivism may be our default evolutionary state.
The more I have been considering this notion, the more sense it makes, and it explains leftist behavior on many levels, imho. I am not trying to say that conservatives are more advanced on the evolutionary scale. Just that somehow, an awful lot of the behaviors exhibited by the left seem to hearken back to more primitive evolutionary behaviors.
One example: morality. The left seems to prefer a “common good” type of ethic for determining what constitutes good morals, i.e. “if it doesn’t harm anybody, it’s ok.” The right seems to prefer a spiritually based system, i.e. “if it doesn’t go contrary to our beliefs, it’s ok.” Arguably, the latter is a more advanced concept, being more abstract in nature. To the left, if it feels ok and seems harmless enough, then it’s fair game, whether that involves substance use, sexual practices, etc. To those on the right, the decision is informed not just by some cosmic divinity, but also by human dignity, etc., (usually derived from the concept of the divinity).
Another example: unions, protectionism, anti-globalism, “buy local groceries”. Typically, this is the domain of the left (shame on protectionist conservatives.) It seems to be a tribal sort of mentality, ‘survival of the herd’, us versus them. A civilization that does not engage constructively with its neighbors will remain very stagnant, as seen in any National Geographic. Hoarding for your tribe seems to the neanderthal like the best way to guarantee survival, especially if all you gotta do is simply take what your tribe needs from whatever OTHER tribe has it. Respecting property rights and negotiating to produce a voluntary transaction is a much more advanced behavior.
I’m sure you all can think of others, and there are plenty of ways in which conservatives exhibit backwards/regressive behaviors, but perhaps it’s a concept worth further discussion? It even explains why the left seemingly has such a hard time understanding the right, but why the right typically has the left figured out. Not to say those on the left are dumb, just that they are so often wedded to less highly evolved behaviors. We all are in one way or another, but at some point reason has triumphed over base instincts for many of us.
Occam’s Beard:
Well, Arianna Huffington makes that claim. I’m not at all sure that she was much of a person of the Right to begin with, ideologically speaking. As a matter of fact, I just looked her up on Wiki and, sure enough, she started out on the liberal/Left and turned to the Right to further the career of hubby Huffington, then turned right back again (that is, Left again!) after their divorce.
Then there’s people like Andrew Sullivan—who keeps saying he’s a man of the Right but who offers precious little evidence for it, except for his rather brief post-9/11 support for Bush.
Personally, I have known a person or two who state that, as they’ve gotten older, they have become more liberal/Left rather than less. But they were always liberals to begin with; just became more so. And I certainly know people who were raised in conservative families and rebelled either as children or teenagers or young adults, changing their politics. But that wouldn’t count either in terms of adult switches; it’s not analogous to what happened to me or to “Robin.”
Otherwise, I’m drawing a blank—can’t think of any full-fledged fully-adult conversions from Right to Left. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, of course. I once wrote this piece attempting to explain the unidirectionality of the change experience.
I’ve not seen any adult Right to Left conversions either.
This might be a selection effect since most people I know are of the Left. The only Right people I knew started, as I did, from the Left.
I know of two right to left conversions.Both came from a rural conservative working class background. Both associated leaving the farm, going to college, and donning the liberal gown with becoming enlightened. But in both cases the transformation was pretty much done by age 19. With one proviso: one was a libertarian as an adult who later became a Democrat.
At the same time, neither are what I would call dogmatic liberals. For example, while one considered it a mistake to to Iraq, even two years ago he took the point that we had to “finish the job.” No unilateral withdrawal for him. With both one can have interesting debates on various issues, airing disagrements in a civil manner.
many of us drawn to the Left were unpopular, lonely children. By being far left, a bunch of misfits can fit in.
and what better way to increase the proportion of misfits than by gender warfare in the home a la feminism… (after all, every boy raised in a single mother home knows they have no purpose and are omittable, and disposable).
U.S. Census Bureau in August, 2007, there are approximately 13.6 million single parents in the United States today, and those parents are responsible for raising 21.2 million children (approximately 26% of children under 21 in the U.S. today).
84% of custodial parents are mothers, and
16% of custodial parents are fathers (tells you what your odds are of custody. which tells you that you have no choice but to put up with everything if you want to see your kids grow up. even that wont help much)
Of the mothers who are custodial parents:
44% are currently divorced or separated
33% have never been married
22% are married (In most cases, these numbers represent women who have remarried.)
1% were widowed
in the past the only kids in this situation normally would have been the 1% who were widowed.
very few kids are in the kinds of homes most of us older people grew up in. they have no culture because you have to transmit culture. couple that with state leftist indoctrination, its amazing any one actually wakes up. (another testiment to the falacious concept of tabula rasa).
[as an aside here are the labor numbers. it also shows what i learned, being responsible has no bearing on you with your kids. so you put up with anything to be with them, and when its all done, its your fault
79% of custodial single mothers are gainfully employed
50% work full time, year round
29% work part-time or part-year
92% of custodial single fathers are gainfully employed
74% work full time, year round
18% work part-time or part-year]
that was from an article that was painting goodness of the situation.
Seventy-five percent of children/adolescents in chemical dependency hospitals are from single parent families – National Survey of American Families
i guess that fits her doing drugs and group events replacing family intimacy…
Sixty-three percent of suicides are individuals from single parent families – FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
Children living at home with both parents grow up with more financial and educational advantages than youngsters raised by one parent Census Brief, CENBR/97-1, issued Sept 1997
Children in single parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems – US Dept of Health and Human Services: National Center for Health Statistics
i guess that would dunk in the misfits category no?
Children who lived with only one parent had lower grade point averages, lower career aspirations, poorer attendance records, and higher drop out rates than students who lived with both parents – Growing Up With A Single Parent, What Hurts, What Helps Cambridge: Harvard University Press
and i guess that would just round out why socialism is more appealing now too.
and just to make sure that this point is nailed dead.
“Feminism, Socialism, and Communism are one in the same, and Socialist/Communist government is the goal of feminism.” – Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (First Harvard University Press, 1989), p.10
“A world where men and women would be equal is easy to visualize, for that precisely is what the Soviet Revolution promised.” – Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York, Random House, 1952), p.806
i guess its ok if all this was what you wanted in life, what you wanted for your kids, and what you would wish on the world. if you didnt know the outcome, then maybe just maybe siding with the journey and putting all the eggs in one basket might have been a bad idea. even worse, so many of them have had such crappy childhoods they thing are normal and everyones that they made everyones childhood crappy and the norm, and so they all hate existence.
i knew this was so when i saw kids from good homes making up bad things in life so that they too can be part of the in crowd of sufferers.
Liberals are submissive’s who are scared of the real world, scared of where they actually are in that world, and they have no way to find meaning in their lives, so they are mental flagilists pretending to find meaning in submission and masochism!!!
24. And hearing, the Master was glad, and gave thanks and came down from the hill top humming a little mechanic’s song. And when the throng pressed him with its woes, beseeching him to heal for it and learn for it and feed it nonstop from his understanding and to entertain it with his wonders he smiled upon the multitude and said pleasantly unto them, “I quit.”
25. For a moment the multitude was stricken dumb with astonishment.
26. And he said unto them, “If a man told God that he wanted most of all to help the suffering world, no matter the price to himself, and God answered and told him what he must do, should the man do as he is told?”
27. “Of course, Master!” cried the many. “It should be pleasure for him to suffer the tortures of hell itself, should God ask it!”
28. “No matter what those tortures, no matter how difficult the task?”
29. “Honor to be hanged, glory to be nailed to a tree and burned, if so be that God has asked,” said they.
30. “And what would you do,” the Master said unto the multitude, “if God spoke directly to your face and said, ‘I COMMAND THAT YOU BE HAPPY IN THE WORLD, AL LONG AS YOU LIVE.’ What would you do then?”
[from illusions: adventures of a reluctant messia]
there is no meaning in just suffering. there is no greater morality from pain. whether there is a god or not, why would you side with a group of people that could not live and be happy?
they are so unhappy to be alive because the world wasnt made for them and doesnt bow to them and doesnt work the way they want it. they are unhappy because real life isnt easy and they dont like where they come up on the merit scale.
but those are the useful idiots, fellow travelers and true believers are not cut of that cloth, they are the ones that know the game from the point of having the useful idiots leashes on hand.
states never have real control
so all state control is accomplished by convincing you, tricking you, or forcing you, when your not in control of the state.
they want all this control and all other powers gone because they know what we all would do to them if we all saw clearly and had some focal point that they didnt control.
lucius, i think you left out bastiat 🙂
collectivism may be our default evolutionary state.
nope… there is a tendency to it, but that tendency is new and a product of despotic rule and exterminating upstarts.
however one is asking the question and not looking at the whole greater picture.
if such were our default, then it would resonate with us and it would be good for us like that. we would be what they claim we are.
but this isnt so. we arent what they claim we are, they have to murder us to get the other half to comply and even that is half hearted.
some animals cant be domesticated. others, humans, can appear domesticated, but thats only an appearance that exists in a plentiful situation. that is, even a bear might seem tame if there was a lazy regular food supply and it need not make effort, but its still wild. this fits humans, because you can see our wild sides when this is not so.
you can also see it in fecundity as animals that cant be domesticated die off in captivity. yeah you can keep captive in abstract ways, or geology and such, but if your captive includes screwing with people and affecting their lives directly we either live minimally where the power really cant get much from us, or we dont have babies and the power cant protect itself. (the people neer fare as well as leaders when invaded and they lose).
so… no.. this is not mans default by any means.
mans default for the majority (not fringe) is peaceful mutually benificial cooperation… we dont need to be taught it, like animals its instinctive to us. in fact so instinctive that we get in legal trouble if we do it our own way and not the states way (and cut them in on the action).
man cooperates and competes…
his societies mostly uses merit churning to progress forward (something socilism short circuits). that is, those who do better have more kids and so move us forward, while those who are less capable have fewer kids and die out. the whole population moves forward and constantly gets smart as long as the mutually benificial cards fall down this way…
socialsm and central rule and control is completely antithetical to this and survival.
prior to 1800s, the concepts were not even thought of other than in stories, and charities did a better job of the tasks anyway (as did those who were wealthy and did good – few did bad compared to the number of wealthy that do good – like any other normal group)
the idea that collectivism is our default when the concept of it wasnt even around througout most of our existence is a hard sell. but us becoming more that way as they kill off those who are individuals, and those who do things on their own and so forth.
but then again, there are two sets and one set is not changing while its impositions change the other set genetically.
[ultimately they are still on the upper elite and lower slave class feudal plan. utopia is at hand. its just for them at your expense. not you. who ever really said everyone was invited?]
Ah Neo, I should have known that you would already have explored an idea that I imagined was original to me. 😉 I did actually read that Kundera post some time back but hadn’t remembered its relevance to my magical thinking ideas. I need to re-read Kundera sometime.
Someone could write one heck of a PhD thesis on Obama as imagalogue.
Imagicalalogue!
Mrs. Whatsit, I am very happy that you see magic all around you. It’s really the results of engineering, but I’m glad you see it as magic. Now if only I could get a paycheck that rivals David Copperfield’s. But that IS magical thinking.
I’m not entirely certain there’s a difference between engineering and magic, to tell you the truth. I’m with you on the paycheck, though!
I considered myself to be a “liberal” in my younger days, but the models for my “liberalism” were people such as JFK, Truman, Bobby Kennedy and Sam Rayburn, people who, if they were around today, would be considered “conservatives” if not “far-right wing extremists.” The times they are a’changin’
First, let me state the proviso that Oblio surely would get a chuckle out of (context: another thread – and that’s all I’m going to say): What I have to say on this (or any subject) may never be taken to be a dogmatic universalism. (Hat Tip, “Tatyana”)
Like so many of you, I came from the other side. My parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, clergy and religious sisters who taught us, and the whole shebang when I was growing up on the North Shore in Massachusetts were FDR Democrats. They were also big into JFK (I was too young at the time to understand why). I was taught that “the Democrats are the party of the working man; Republicans represent the rich.” After I got out of the Army in August of ’76 I started college in the Fall of ’77, and all of my inherited biases, worldview, and religious sensibilities set the table for me to become intrigued with Marxism. Mind you, not the Leninist kind – I was more intrigued with the cultural Marxism of Gramsci and the Frankfurt School thinkers. And because I was feeling the tug of religious life, and I had philosophy as a minor (I was an economics major), I was also reading a lot of the books of the more systematic and elegant Liberation Theologians. And yet I was still, because of my ethical orientation, desirous for the truth. I had many conservative classmates and a few friends who were conservatives. I listened to them. I even read some articles they recommended that I absorb and think about. And I did. It planted a seed, but it took ten years for me to finally discover on my own that utopian thought was indeed a flight from reality.
I didn’t know any fellow Leftists who did as I did: sincerely considered the other side’s arguments and make them the counterpoint that would drive my investigations into Marxist thought. They were all committed to the socialist transformation of society and had no doubts about troubling points in their ideology. During my two years in Chicago at Loyola, while in graduate philosophy studies, on my own I dug into as much as I could find about the subject of Evil. Because, folks, that’s what blows it all apart. You cannot have The Perfect Society, Heaven on Earth, and The New Moral Man if you still have Evil hanging around. In all its forms. What I was finding in my admittedly non-expert investigations into psychology, genetics, neuroscience, and cosmology was that Evil is an intractable reality. It is not just the outcome of human choice (which is certainly a large part of it). Evil is deeply embedded into the very fabric of life and the universe. It has an organic basis. Anyone who has seriously looked at the physiological dimensions of sociopathy knows this.
So, the Marxists cannot banish Evil. And because they cannot banish it, they are not the masters of history and the inheritors of the mantle of progress. Parallel to those thought experiments and investigations I carried out on my own for my own intellectual development, I made the choice to look at the evidence of history to make a more mature decision about socialism. Failure and even catastrophe everywhere. Caused by its own incompetence. I heard and read all the excuses the Communists and socialists came up with and I didn’t buy it. I’m sure you all know some of them: they call come down to this – the capitalists caused us to fail. After I left the Jesuits and went on to an MBA program to at least make myself marketable for gainful employment, I specialized in Finance. There I learned how the system really works and noted how my former Marxist associates knew next to nothing about how wealth is created and dispersed.
So, today I note how very, very few people understand what a hurdle rate is for business investment and how taxes and regulations have a profound effect on job growth and company success. The people in power now are clueless about it.
During that journey I made I noted that my motivations for embracing radical thought were often not the same as my fellow Leftists. I won’t speculate what theirs were, but in conversations with them my values and my motives did not strike familiar chords with them. I remained, all the time, kind of an outsider among them. Because of my clinging to Catholicism. And because I would not agree to brand my ideological leanings as “progressivism” and “liberalism.” I openly called myself a socialist and ruffled a few feathers because of it. And learned a lot about who those people are. They are liars and opportunists. They prey on the young and immature. And I could not countenance that. When I taught college freshman at Loyola for intro. to philosophy survey courses, I left my politics at the door. Some of these people I knew did not do that.
But I remember that 1987 was the year I broke with the Left. Thereafter I was a moderate to conservative Democrat until 2002.
I know two people who ostensibly were Reagan supporters in the Eighties and are now liberal-Left Democrats: my wife’s sister and her husband. But I think they never truly were conservatives. He was originally a Canadian and he sees the role of government much as Europeans and Canadians do see it. He has heavy, obnoxious BDS, and he’s sold the whole kit and caboodle to his wife, which surprises me since she’s better educated than he is and should know better.
Robin writes well, and she is causing quite a stir. I am looking at her as a kind of junior Left Coast Neo-Neocon, at least for now. My loyalty remains with the Original, New England version, despite posts about the ballet.
Fred makes a great point about the ineradicable nature of “evil” in the story of his break with Pelagianism. Game theoreticians confirm the point when they talk about the instability of certain common game structures, in which the possibility of productive cooperation exists, but the dominant strategy leads to destructive behavior (read: deception, cheating, crime, war). Robert Axelrod had a big impact on my thinking through his examination’s of the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Evolution_of_Cooperation
I suppose that complexity science is extending this line of analysis.
The title of the Prisoner’s Dilemma recalls for me the lines from The Wasteland:
This is the so-called “tragic” view of life that experience and compassion together bring.
that’s The Waste Land…I thought my proofreading was improving
Neo,
Thank you for the link to Robin at the American Thinker. I thoroughly enjoyed her posts; they reminded me of your essays regarding your migration away from Democrat liberalism after 9/11.
I found a personal connection with her (and your) writings about political conversion. I grew up as a Republican but I was never quite sure why I was a conservative aside from my parents being so. I always felt an empathy towards liberals and their ideas on social justice, social security, minimum wage, woman’s right to choose, etc. Arguing a conservative point of view made less and less sense to me; yet I couldn’t miss that so many liberal cornerstones always seemed to have opposite outcomes from what was intended. This was always a puzzling point of contention for me.
Then in 2004, leading up to the presidential election, I discovered books by John Stossel and Thomas Sowell and blogs like Powerline, Instapundit and yours. They presented logical and complete arguments without playing favorites, and unveiled an unsettling intellectual dishonesty in the media. At the same time it showed me a community of people who respected factual argument, critical thinking and historical accountability. It opened me to a new way of seeing everything.
To a very large degree your blog, and by extension Robin’s letters, have echoed my own journey; I’ve become mostly Libertarian with my own unique points of view from where I was. Also, living in Washington, DC conservatives and non-liberals meeting and expressing their ideas in the open can be very detrimental to one’s ability to work and have any quality social life. I can empathize with the difficulty of standing one’s ground in the face of often unpleasant peer pressure. Testimonials like yours do give me faith that there is light at the end of the tunnel, and that it’s not an oncoming train.
Thanks again and keep up the thoughtful posts with the great research and links!
I am also Postliberal, with similar experiences to those described here.
There is also rational ignorance (Arnold Kling describes this well over at TCSDaily). Our individual votes do not actually change elections. Even in my town of 10-20K citizens, no election or warrant article has passed by only a single vote in my 30+ years here. We may hope to change the opinions of others around us by persuasion, but few of us accomplish this with more than a handful. You don’t really get anything back for your vote in terms of how the government impacts your life, and only a little from your persuasive effort.
In such a situation why not adopt a political view that makes you more popular, or makes you feel better about yourself? This is the draw of liberalism. One gets a reputation for morality and goodness on the cheap, as well as related feelings of self-regard. One has to be pretty devoted to seeing the truth, including the truth about oneself, to give up liberalism.
neo, et al,
I would like to draw everyone’s attention to an article at Front Page, yesterday’s lineup. It’s a speech by Jamie Glazov about his recent book, “United in Hate,” which I am ordering today at amazon.
The book explores some of the psychological aspects of the Left’s affinity for totalitarian systems, monsters, and its love affair with Islam.
http://frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=35079
the same? equal? no explanation for disparity in salaries? how about the fact that they want different things from work? nope, its evil moriarty!!! i mean patriarchy!!
Increase in women doctors ‘will put strain on the NHS’
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article6419722.ece
Women doctors will outnumber their male colleagues in a decade but the change is likely to place a strain on the health service, according to a new report.
More than half of all new medical students are women but they are far more likely than men to work part-time and choose specialties where they have set hours, according to the study by the Royal College of Physicians. This could lead to a shortage of surgeons and doctors in obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics or public health, and a need to recruit more doctors overall, the report suggests.
At present women account for 40 per cent of all doctors, 42 per cent of GPs and 28 per cent of consultants. However, they are forecast to make up the majority of GPs by 2013 and the majority of the medical workforce some time after 2017.
“Across the NHS, 43 per cent of all women doctors are under the age of 35, so many will not yet have started families,” it adds. “And the proportion of women of child-bearing age will rise sharply in the next decade as the larger cohort of women medical students graduates.”
I guess preventing the guys from being there TOO so that the numbers even out will not result in an equal outcome.
that is, if you divide the money paid for the education, and the outcomes… you will find that the returns are not the same..
“Across the NHS, 43 per cent of all women doctors are under the age of 35, so many will not yet have started families,” it adds. “And the proportion of women of child-bearing age will rise sharply in the next decade as the larger cohort of women medical students graduates.”
in essence if women are the doctors you need many more doctors to do the same amount of work over the same mout of years for the same amout of money invested in school.
Most NHS doctors, both men and women, still work full-time, with only about 15 per cent on part-time contracts. But in hospitals, 21 per cent of women are on part-time contracts, compared with 8 per cent of men. At senior consultant level, 30 per cent of women are working part-time.
===============
he Women and Medicine report – which follows a two-year review – said there was no evidence that women were more likely than men to leave medicine entirely. However, a 15-year follow-up of doctors after graduation shows that, on average, and after career breaks and part-time working is taken into account, women fulfil 60 per cent of the role of a full-time doctor while men fulfil 80 per cent.
i am not choosing either side here…
if you think i am, maybe the evidence is telling you something that you might want to blame me for.
but in essence. i have not said that women should leave medicine, have i? have i said the state should fix it? nope.
all i did was lay out the cause and effect and facts as to the current and future situations.
YOU figure out what those facts tell you is the right thing to do or not.
dont blame me if the facts make you think things that the absence of facts allowed you peace of mind and to adopt an attitude where real facts were more of an enemy than fantasy and its horrible real world outcomes.
Artfldgr: thanks for the thoughtful response, you’ve given me some interesting things to think about.
Oblio: imo the iterated prisoner’s dilemma does a fantastic job of explaining most of human behavior. It had a big impact on my perspective, as well.
FredHjr: ty for that link, lots more food for thought for me to mull over.
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
— Arthur C. Clarke
“Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.”
— Unknown
“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”
— Grey’s Law
artfuls reversal: any sufficiently advanced malice can hide in incompetence