A cloud of related ideas here:

First, what is considered normal comes from subcultures. People get their ideas of what is normal from the people they interact with regularly. Different subcultures can exist in close physical proximity – for example, different social classes traditionally had very different views of what was normal behaviour.

Speculation: are people today more ignorant or dismissive of other subcultures? I observed previously, for example, that the rich used to have more personal contact with the poor – they had servants, tenants, etc. that they knew as actual people, though not the same sort of person. Today technology makes it easier for the rich to avoid dealing with people from other classes, and an ideology of equality makes it embarassing to do so, since you are supposed to believe that they are of the same culture as you, even though they blatantly aren’t.

Social class is just one example, as another, there are obvious differences in the way of life between urban, suburban and rural environments. Young people in cities can meet each other in the evenings easily – young people in suburbia are more isolated from each other.

Really important point: people’s behaviour is much more constrained by what they consider normal, from their subculture, than by what they believe to be true intellectually.

Next consequence of this: crime and order. If, by effective enforcement, you make law-abiding behaviour normal among most subcultures, you will not have much crime. This is really the only way to not have much crime.

A society where it is not normal to commit crimes can do all sorts of things that are otherwise impossible. This goes back to a post I made way back in 2005. The biggest cost of crime is the forgone opportunity – all the things we could do, but don’t because we would run too much risk of crime. As I mentioned on twitter this week, the concept of a supermarket — goods displayed in the open for customers to pick for themselves and bring to a checkout — depends on an assumption that people just walking out with the stuff will be rare enough that you can handle it. (That assumption is apparently starting to fail in some areas now, such as parts of San Francisco). In Britain in the 19th and 20th Century, rarity of crime was one of the basic presumptions that people didn’t have to think about.

Aside: Not only that, but, in accordance with my original point, what crime there was was largely in certain subcultures — the immigrant “rookeries” of London’s East End, for example. Away from those subcultures, it was rarer than average statistics suggest. Even today, much of the civilised world still lives in an environment of very low crime. (That’s a point Steve Sailer makes from time to time).

This basic presumption obviously gets taken for granted. That’s the root of my divergence from libertarianism — given the presumption of an ordered society, it is fine. However, that ordered society needs to be actively preserved.

When I made the point about supermarkets on Twitter, obviously there was a lot of feedback to the effect that, as in the Dickensian rookeries, it is in minority subcultures that the law-abiding norms are not present. Even accepting that, though, it is possible for effective law enforcement to change what is normal in those subcultures. Obviously the story in San Fransisco is that the abdication of law enforcement is the immediate trigger. (I say “story” deliberately — I’m always cautious about pretending to understand what is going on so far away, and the reality may be a lot more complex than what I can see. However, I will stand by the logic of what I am saying here while being open to more information on the detail).

I don’t know much about Ukraine. One thing I do know is that there was a revolution there in 2014 that was supported by the US, which overthrew a government that was friendly with Russia and replaced it with one that was unfriendly to Russia.

(There’s a whole lot I suspect or think I know about that revolution, and the relationship of the new government to the USA and particular figures within the USA, that isn’t necessarily reliable.)

I just want to contextualise with this, from Moldbug in 2008. A minor problem with his style is that he will throw something very interesting into a much larger piece, and as a result the interesting element isn’t easily linkable. So I’ve just copied and pasted the last chunk out of https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2008/09/america-vampire-of-world-part-2/

Most of the piece is itself a quotation from Elie Kedourie’s The Chatham House Version. That is the portion in italics below, including the indented quotations within that.

Extract from

America: vampire of the world (part 2)

MENCIUS MOLDBUG · SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

It could be worse, however. One of the points that Kedourie cleared up for me was the origin of the Armenian genocide. Did you ever wonder why, exactly, the Young Turks decided to murder their Armenians? Did you think it was just because they were evil, or because they were Turkish, or because they didn’t have an electoral college and a bicameral legislature?

Well, all three of these things may be true. But until I read Kedourie, I had only heard two sides of the story—the Turkish side, which is that it didn’t happen, and the Armenian side, which is that it did. History, unfortunately, often comes with far more than two sides:

No means but insurrection: this was clear and it was meant seriously. The leaders of the Armenian nationalist movement had already decided that autonomy was their goal and they thought they had a strategy to achieve it. And these leaders took care that Armenians would not be found to help with the reforms. For it was not in vain that they surveyed the history of Europe from the French Revolution, and not in vain that they meditated on the liberation of Greece, Serbia, Rumania and Bulgaria from the Ottoman yoke. They would make insurrection and they would bring the Armenian Question ‘to the front’. Then the Powers would have to deal with it, and if they failed to deal with it according to the desires of the nationalists, why, there were always other means of keeping the Armenian Question ‘to the front’.

[…]

The aim of nationalists is clear. It was to create ‘incidents’, provoke the Turks to excesses, and thereby bring about the intervention of the Powers. The British Blue Books of the period before the massacres are full of reports of attacks by Armenian agents or bands on Turks and Kurds, of the distribution of seditious prints, of the discoveries by Ottoman authorities of caches of bombs and arms, of demonstrations organized by Armenians in Constantinople and the provinces. In most cases, the incidents would have no immediate far-reaching consequences, but some of them, either owing to circumstances or to the ill-will of Ottoman officials, led to serious results. In Sasun in 1894, in Zeitun in 1895, the incidents led to armed risings by the Armenians of these localities which were, of course, bloodily suppressed. An outcry was the result, consular commissions were appointed to investigate, and the Armenian leaders had the consolation of knowing that another blow had been struck in the cause of Armenian independence.

The Blue Books also record another class of incident, quite as large as the first, created by the nationalists, but this much more sinister. It seems that the nationalists had to convince not only the Ottoman government and the Powers of the wisdom of satisfying their desires, they had to convince the generality of the Armenian people as well. This must be the explanation of the attack organized by them on the patriarch as he was officiating in the cathedral of Koum Kapou at Constantinople in July 1890, as a result of which he had to resign his office; of a subsequent attempt to assassinate another patriarch in 1894; of the recurrent reports of Armenians executed for being ‘informers’, for refusing to contribute to nationalist funds, for ‘collaborating’ with the Ottoman government. Nor did the nationalists try to hide or excuse these activities. Here is a passage from a revolutionary placard posted in Sivas in December 1893:

Osmanlis!… The examples are before your eyes. How many hundreds of rascals in Constantinople, Van, Erzerum, Alashkert, Harpout, Cesarea, Marsovan, Amassia and other towns have been killed by the Armenian revolutionaries? What were these rascals? Armenians! And again Armenians! If our aim was against the Mohamedans or Mohamedanism, as the government tries to make you think, why should we kill the Armenians?

The Armenians were forced to be free.

What did the Ottoman government have to say to all this? Its attitude was as clear as that of the nationalists: this agitation would have only one result, to invite Europe to meddle again in the affairs of the Ottoman empire. This was not to be tolerated; the Armenians had to desist or they would take the consequences.

[…]

And the incidents continued to be organized. In 1897, just after the massacres of 1895–6, and in 1905, there are records of minor insurrections also leading to massacres. And on the eve of the Young Turk coup d’etat of 1908, there was still the same tension in Ottoman Armenia fed and tended by the revolutionaries. This the American ambassador in a dispatch of 5 August 1907 speaks of ‘a considerable degree of disaffection and revolutionary movement on the part of a portion of the Armenian population in the district of Van. Several cold-blooded murders have been committed even in the streets of that city and a certian feeling of apprehension and unrest appears generally to prevail’; and in another dispatch he reports several more disturbances in Van, revolutionaries killing and wounding seventeen Ottoman soldiers, executing a ‘traitor’, and a considerable store of rifles, cartridges and dynamite seized. Later, when the catastrophe was final, complete, irredeemable, the nationalists were still indignant that their methods had had such untoward consequences. They could not understand why salvation was so recalcitrant in coming, why the easy path which the examples of so many European revolutions had promised should have proved so full of vipers and of nettles. The desolate wind of futility blows through the report the Dashnaks presented to the International Socialist Congress in Hamburg in 1923.

Every time that, through the irresistible force of things, the movement of Armenian emancipation expressed itself in revolutionary action, every time that the party of the Armenian Risorgimento tried, at the head of the conscious elements of the country, to draw the attention of the world, by armed insurrections or peaceful demonstrations, to the intolerable fate of the Armenian people, the Turkish government threw the Armenian masses, peaceful and disarmed, to the mercy of its troops, its bachi-bazouks and of the Turkish and Kurdish mob.

There is a surprised air about the statement.

I’ve been thinking a lot about a conversation I had on twitter with a private mutual.

We were looking at the question of reliable sources of information, and I brought up Patrick McKenzie’s tweets emphasising that there are independent commenters (Andy Ngo, Scott Alexander etc.) who are by now just predictably much more reliable than credentialed experts.

“It is February 2020. You can choose one and only one of a) the top-voted lesswrong coronavirus explainer and b) the entirety of the public health field to bet on. Bet will be called in December 2021.”

The response was that many previously good sources have been spectacularly full of shit over the pandemic.

“I’ve watched smart people whose opinions I’ve found worthwhile on a broad array of political topics become completely consumed by disinfo on this pandemic. They’re the new Russia hoaxers. Intelligence is not immunity.”

My response: “People who specifically do politics are rarely reliable on reality. I’ve seen a lot of cool fun people get seriously deranged (in different directions). People who seemed grounded and reliable before, still seem grounded and reliable. More so than MSM or officially credentialed.”

And that’s basically my position. I follow a bunch of cool fun political commentators, who write well and have insights, but I am not shocked that a number of them have been completely wrong about a factual issue. The people who are reliable are generally very careful to avoid being explicitly political.

That’s not the interesting bit here. What I have been dwelling on is that I am one of the political ones, not one of the reliable ones.

As an example, take this tweet of mine.

This, by my standards, is a pretty good tweet. It is a fact that Britain has had to go to unusual lengths to keep the electricity running lately, and has spent billions bringing on extra power at unprecedented market prices. It is also not something that has much mainstream attention.

When I say we are not going to have reliable electricity for the next twenty years — well, that might be true. But I don’t really know. I’ve jumped a bunch of steps of reasoning for the sake of a “Take”. I’m against shifting away from gas and coal and building tons of wind power because I think they’re wasteful, and I’ve exaggerated my confidence to defend my position.

Maybe paying these very expensive spot prices and balancing mechanism charges now and again is actually completely manageable, and we can go on like this another twenty years. I haven’t even really dug into it to that level of detail, and my sources of news on the issue are people who are even more partisan on the question than me.

I still think I’m right. But that’s partly guesswork, and stating a bald prediction as I did means I can’t be one of the “reliable sources” I was discussing above.

I have to stop doing this shit. Why do I even do it? For a “good take” that gets 2000 impressions and 200 engagements on Twitter? That’s not my job. To influence the government, move them democratically to better policies? I don’t believe in that stuff at all. I’m just playing at being a pundit.

The Daughter of the House has developed an attraction to the chauffeur. Her brother wants to become an Actor. Their mother has discovered Krishna and wants to celebrate Janmashtami in the grounds of the House.

For a respectable member of the ruling class¹, any one of these would be a crisis. People Like Us don’t do that sort of thing. It’s not fitting, it’s just wrong. What will the neighbours think?

This stuck-up attitude, obsessed with appearances, hostile to “inferiors”, suspicious of difference, has been a target to be opposed for at least a hundred years. For fifty years, it has been worse: openly mocked from all quarters. Today we have a new ruling class, only partly descended from the old one, and identified with Masters degrees and managerial jobs rather than titles and country houses.

The fundmentals of human society haven’t changed though. The members, actual and aspirational, of the ruling class still need to show that they belong there, that they have loyalty to the same principles that the rest of the class does. Luckily, this does not require great effort of calculation². Fitting in with a clique is a natural instinct. If you speak or act in a way that your peer group will not approve of, you will be very aware of it. You will probably feel nervous, or even nauseous. To break the mores of ones social circle takes a deliberate effort, to avoid doing so is much easier.

Among the mores of the new ruling class, anti-racism has pride of place. Its members are sincerely non-racist, but, in addition, they are terrified of appearing to be racist. Anything that could be construed as or resmbles racism will also produce a gut reaction, as well as a rational concern for one’s social position. Your chauffeur might be a gentle and intelligent young man with good prospects of an engineering career, who could make your daughter happy, but your neighbours won’t understand all that, even if you do.

This semi-rational, semi-reflex attitude is what I was getting at in Fear and Equality. When the coronavirus first appeared, the calls to act to prevent it spreading felt racist. “You must protect yourself from this dangerous thing” makes liberals feel immediately uneasy, and they are conditioned to avoid even digging into that unease. On top of that, coming out on the same side as President Trump and the murky Silicon Valley subculture, felt equally bad.

That was then. Before too long, COVID was blatantly something worth protecting from. It doesn’t seem to me very likely that it could ever have been prevented from spreading across the world, but it was surely worth a try, and even slowing it down by weeks would have been very beneficial.

Today we are not being told not to fear it. On the contrary, the culturally dominant opinion has gone to the other extreme. People should wear masks. Everyone should get vaccinated. More notably, anyone arguing otherwise is basically a murderer who should be silenced, fired, and punished. It’s easy to see how that view fits the ruling class worldview just as well as it’s no worse than the flu, prejudice is the real virus did. We are no longer dealing with an abstract, allegedly-dangerous “other” and Donald Trump’s travel bans. We are dealing with a very familiar enemy: rednecks who like to carry guns and now recklessly go outside breathing. Tucker Carlson. People who think George Soros is conspiring to smuggle slave-children onto secret islands. In last year’s post I said, talking about threats when considering the coronavirus, There is one exception. If the thing you are warning against is rich white people, or if you can at least claim it’s rich white people, you are safe. nobody is uneasy about that. “Rich white people” isn’t quite right; I meant, from the point of view of the UN, “white people in rich countries”, but within the context of Britain or the USA, the acceptable target group is that white outgroup; christians, social conservatives, Brexiters or rural gun-owners. Now if you say that perhaps the benefits of vaccinating children don’t really justify even small risks, or that masks aren’t proved to do much good and people should be allowed to make up their own minds, you might think you have reasonable arguments, but it feels like you are with the “Bill Gates is implanting chips” loonies or the “Assault weapons are a civil right”³ monsters. What will the neigbours think?

Once you start seeing the dominant class of the West as stereotype upper-class characters in an English period drama, it could not be more obvious. While I’ve been writing this, I’ve seen a piece on the blackballing of Amy Chua, and a tweet from Ben Sixsmith referencing the British state shying away from dealing with Pakistani grooming gangs (prior to Nazir Afzal making it OK). All these stories become more comprehensible if, while reading them, you mutter to yourself, “What will the neighbours think?”

This is not just groupthink, it’s groupthink on steroids because maintaining one’s social position requires following the groupthink.

Postscript

This is a piece about the ruling class of America, not a piece about COVID-19. I know people who believe that we should take all possible steps to eliminate the virus, and people who think we should have let it run rather than sacrifice any freedom. The people I know in both of those groups have reached those conclusions based on their values and view of the evidence, and been consistent in the face of the partisan reversal that happened in the public sphere. I don’t agree with either (though I’m slightly closer to the second group), but I don’t mean this as a dig at any of them: it’s just that I was writing about the WHO and their reluctance to be racist to viruses last year, and when today they went back to their old ways with a campaign against e-cigarettes, the social mechanisms behind my previous post were made clearer to me.