> "to genuine believers, they truly represent psychological transcendence over base personal desire and lack of power. To others, they represent submission and impotence. Self-mastery vs. mastery of others. Each perspective seems alien to the other."
Loved the whole essay, but this especially. Viewed in isolation, one might conclude that this is an essay about Christianity. And maybe it is? In City of God, Augustine contrasts three possible motivations for a person. Within the "city of man", there are pursuit of glory for one's earthly city (early Rome) and pursuit of self-interest (late Rome). Within the "city of God", there is the pursuit of self-abandonment out of love for God. One might view our modern Course of Honors as the final form of what you get when you try to develop a Course of Honors paradoxically around self-abasement.
You are very right to accuse me of writing a 10k word essay with an entire unstated subtext. I mostly write these softer pieces when I sit down to write a more technical essay and realize I first need to frame my cultural disagreements before I talk about the numbers.
The Christianity angle is an interesting one. Certainly it's at the heart of much of our national moral philosophy (hence the Batman Begins tweet snippet). Should you or should you not try to build the City of God in the present day world? Should you attempt to Immanentize the eschaton? A good Christian answer seems obvious here.
That said, to spoil it for you & any brave readers who make it ALL the way down here, the subtext buried in this essay is about the role of sanctions in geopolitics and congressional approvals for war. I'll leave it at that for now lest I disincentivize myself from actually writing the thing.
Harpham's "The Ascetic Imperative" is a masterful examination of the idea that Western culture, specifically after Christ, is a history of ascetic impulses.
This essay has been the first essay I've read in a long time that gave me some truly novel insights and I want to thank you for it. Thank you for writing this. It brought me back to the old internet back when we could still discuss interesting ideas in depth.
I have a few random thoughts I want to share that are prompted by this article. It's a long article and my thoughts might be a little jumbled but y'all can take them or leave them as you see fit.
First, because it's freshest on my mind, a simple note about you mentioning that the arson data for San Francisco seems weird. I moved away years ago, I don't know if it's still like this. But when I lived in San Francisco it became clear to me, paying close attention to local happenings and reading between some lines, that a significant fraction of arson in San Francisco is political in nature. I'm talking things like "the fancy luxury condo development mysteriously burned down overnight" kind of things. I suspected this for a while, but became convinced during a random conversation with my at-the-time girlfriend's mom. Her mom was a radical activist from the 80s and she once flippantly said "the protestors these days have no balls. Back in the 80s, when we were fighting gentrification, we burned things down". The casual and confident way she said this made me believe that she was serious. I have no idea to what extent this would skew the arson numbers for San Francisco, but if San Francisco is an outlier relative to other cities on that metric, this might explain that
Second, speaking of ex-girlfriends' mothers, I had a different ex-girlfriend whose parents were both US Federal employees in northern Virginia. I never quite had the vocabulary to describe exactly what I thought their character flaws were, but you have hit the nail perfectly on the head with this essay. In short (and I hope this is a charitable and accurate summary of one of your points): her mother was exactly the kind of TDTPT bureaucrat who has completely and totally subjugated her personal will to the incentive framework of her superiors, and who has internalized the "de-escalate conflict over all else" framing you laid out above, including the sort of condescending pity of "they're just like that".
This is something that I have struggled to understand for a long time. Like, I can fully and totally understand the priority placed on non-violent de-escalation, walking away from conflicts, etc. As a very non-aggressive man, that is what I usually do, and it makes sense to me. But what I have never been able to understand or make my peace with, is why a pass is given to some people to break these norms. Why it seems, for instance, that the property criminals in San Francisco can get away with break-ins, muggings, and thefts, and the people like my ex's mom will blame the victim for not securing their car, but if _I_ were to break in and mug them, they'd use the full weight of the state's violence to destroy my life without a second thought.
It's especially baffling to me, because one of the conventional culture-war explanations for this is essentially "the people taking this condescending, victim-blaming attitude are so privileged that they can isolate themselves from most of these violent consequences, and so they do not experience the actual harms when they're moralizing". Eg, they live in the suburbs so _their_ cars never get broken into. However, in my experience, this is clearly untrue. The people doing this moralizing in SF, for example, have all been mugged and robbed before, and I don't understand what social or material benefit they get that is so strong that they feel no desire whatsoever to materially improve the safety and quality of life standards of where they live. The best explanation I've been able to come up with is that they've elevated Christian style 'turn-the-other-cheek' almost into a fetish, and they get off on it. This is obviously an uncharitable and unsatisfying explanation.
Finally, my third thought is to observe an intense negative personal reaction to reading much of this essay. At the risk of oversharing, I am (or perhaps was) an extremely high TDTPT person. In fact, in my highschool I was the highest achieving student in the 40 year history of the school. I "did everything right", I "followed the rules", I "made the authority happy". I am not successful in any of the ways you lay out for the elites in this article. I don't have any understanding of why this system, which appears to be tailor-made to elevate people like me, has failed me so hard. But I can tell you, these days, I no longer have any desire to past tests, and I actively snub the noses of authority figures. _That_ dynamic I can explain easily: the system has failed me, and I see no reason to subordinate myself to it when there is no payoff. Still, I struggle greatly with trying to understand how it go to this point.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it -- I enjoyed writing it!
Re: arson -- yes, my own model of the world mirrors yours, and I sort of view it as one potential "voice of the unheard" type response from certain factions, which is why I floated it going up in response to heavy handed police crackdowns as one potential hypothesis. I don't think we'll ever get the data to really say. But some people do indeed seem to like setting things on fire in response to undesirable political action.
Re: "northern Virginia" character types...I can only smile. And it makes perfect sense to me, in the context of this essay, why those types rise up the ranks of our bureaucracies so smoothly.
I actually cut about 2k words out of this essay digging further on this thread because I thought it was a bit too tangential from my main point, but if you'll forgive me for posting it back here, minus cool images that you'll have to imagine:
__________
Different Ways To Climb The Ladder
There’s another group of children who pass the same test without needing to transcend their body’s natural instincts: the ones who simply don’t eat the marshmallow because they didn’t care to.
For them, the non-aggression principle ALSO makes a ton of sense and so you can expect to see some initial agreement on responsible norms between these two groups.
To outsiders, it may even be tough to tell them apart. They are not following the Cardinal Rule of Elite Status. They are following their own rule: the Iron Rule of Violence: anything that gets started has the potential to go all the way.
If someone does start a conflict, this second group of kids — who otherwise blend in seamlessly with the high Desire To Pass Tests kids on account of their test-acing skills — will pay no mind whatsoever to the preferences of the system and its administrators.
To say it more clearly: the “test” is whether or not you are involved in violence. Fail this test and you don’t qualify for elite status in America.
Whether you start it or not, your responsibility is always and everywhere to mitigate and deescalate it as an aspiring climber of the elite Course of Honors across almost all domains. To simply be around while it happens is a failing, to be a part of it is damning.
But note that this test itself does not care whether you aced it by following the Cardinal Rule — never escalate a situation — or by following the Iron Rule — even small acts can escalate, so refrain from making them unless you are committed.
Which means these two sets of kids and everyone on the spectrum between them climb up the Course of Honors with applause. They live and breath amongst each other in perfect harmony. Until…
Code Switching: Beneath the Mask
The key to understand the psyche of “iron rule” kids is to think about how their own ego models someone initiating a minor act of violence against them. In their mind, that other person is opting into a conflict that could turn existential. The high Desire To Pass Tests kids never really consider this possibility, they’re committed to de-escalation from the drop. But the low Desire To Pass Tests kids are well aware of their own potential responses and have no instinctive urge to shy away from responding with aggression of their own.
From their point of view, the instigator of violence has just said to them: “yes, I know this conflict might escalate until one of us is very very upset, but I have nonetheless initiated it. I do so because I expect to dominate you either physically or psychologically.”
Fully appreciating this statement from the perspective of the victimized child and their ego results in a much harsher judgment of the aggressor — regardless of how minor the stakes are!
This kid’s ego has two possible interpretations: I have been attacked because i) they expect me to be a coward, or ii) they don’t think I present a serious threat. Both of these massive ego blows sum to perceived impotence.
Impotence manifests as rage.
And in this case, the ego of the child has not been sublimated to external authority. Perceived impotence coupled with direct conflict is a recipe for escalation! And not a small little escalation, but a significant and personal one!
Minority Report says they just committed zeroth degree murder on you: premeditated future murder of both your body and your soul.
The natural escalation is one that responds to that future potential and not the past action:
And if you understand that psyche and then switch again, back into the point of view of an onlooker with high Desire To Pass Tests, a good boy for whom escalating a conflict if the unforgivable sin, ask: who do they view with more apprehension?
The initiator of conflict — “one of thems” — who they knew well to steer clear of and back down from? Or the kid who seemed like “one of us” and just revealed all of a sudden that he was filled with uncontrollable rage and secretly capable of far worse the whole time!
This is one reason the other kids in Ender’s Game are so consistently horrified by him. He seems quiet and well-socialized and as “normal” as can be at an elite program for gifted kids. And then he unpredictably and radically over-escalates a situation to ensure he wins forever and everyone else goes home in a literal body bag.
He does not believe in the rules of any game — he only appears outwardly to comply to the extent that compliance overlaps with victory.
It is this violation of expectations that results in his condemnation. The child who showed he had the necessary restraint to avoid initiating violence…but then responded with excessive violence of his own, violates expectations in a way that can only ever earn ostracization and condemnation from the rest of one’s elite peers.
Precisely because you can refrain from eating the marshmallow, people expect you not to eat it.
Even when it means you lose the game.
Especially when it means you lose the game.
__________
I think that above segment pattern matches quite nicely with what you described :) Perhaps I ought to have included it as a footnote.
Re: personal struggles with the system -- without knowing specifics, I can't really comment with much accuracy. But I will say, the academic tests themselves are merely a single aspect of the Course of Honors. On their own, they are usually insufficient. A system that elevated people purely based on academic scores would look markedly different to the one we have today (& everyone knows this, however SAYING it aloud is usually a violation of our system's preferences).
But as you say, you "followed the rules" so perhaps you understood this too? But it's not JUST about "not breaking" rules, you need people to like you and want to support you and promote you and invest in you ("mentor" you), and to make that happen you've got to find some dimension along which to market yourself to those with more power than you.
This too is part of the game. You can choose a few different marketing options here, thankfully we are not the USSR, however even for technical roles that do care about quantitative performance, after high school most of these marketing options will have "technically capable" as mere table stakes.
I'm sure it will not have escaped your notice that the "northern Virginia" folks will sublimate personal desires to the system's desires without even thinking of it, will de-escalate any potential violence, will condescend to the less fortunate with "they're just like that" like it's breathing...but will execute the most machiavellian political cruelty upon their peers if the opportunity presents itself, with plausible deniability of course. You are expected to offer condolences to the peer you've just stabbed in the back (metaphorically, of course you merely gave a negative review about one of their direct reports) -- AND they are expected to smile and thank you for them.
The contradictions are part of the game.
The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao may be cynical, but it puts "Clueless" at the bottom and "Sociopaths" at the top of any organizational hierarchy for a reason. Read it if you haven't :)
I think your analysis (interesting though it is) is questionable on multiple points, but I'll focus on the most important one: like almost all discourse on "elites" you fail to define the term. Who are these elites who are so compliant and conflict averse? Elon Musk or Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or CZ don't seem to fit that description!
Thank you Aris. I think the term is best left undefined -- as the definition is contingent on the era & city in question. The way the essay lays it out, the "elite" is the group which rises through established channels to have an outsized impact on society. The way one climbs to elite status through the Politburo in China is obviously rather different from the way one climbs the ladder of corporate finance in New York City, but certain things about both processes generalize.
Standalone "Great Men" of history like Musk or Bezos tend to chart their own course and are not particularly similar to the likes of professionalized elites that I describe in this essay, though they obviously have a tremendous influence on society. It is the difference between a King and his Knights. There is a playbook for how to become a Knight. Less so a King.
Ok, so then you're talking about the managerial class, not the top top of the pyramid. What evidence is there then to support that the characteristics of that class differ in the modern Western world from any other managerial class in history, from Spartan warriors to Athenian orators to Chinese bureaucrat/scholars to the British public school ethos? All were trained to be compliant, disciplined workers.
The essay begins by referencing a piece by Crémieux -- I'd recommend giving it a read, it's worth it!
Unless you think that the SF Big Tech Elites are overrepresented in committing assault, I think the differences are self-evident at that point. It was the springboard for my whole piece really. Why is it that the elites in Venice were violent and aggressive, whereas the elites in San Francisco are predominantly victimized?
Well, first, I don't think you can build a grand theory of violence based on two data points! Second, there are more factors to consider when analysing violence than the character of the perpetrator - one, for instance, being the sanctity of human life, personal liberty etc. Third, are you comparing like for like? Are the elites you're looking at in Venice basically the bureaucrats, or are they the top-dog aristocrats?
Yes, indeed, I also don't think you can build a "grand theory of violence" in this way, which is why the essay's introduction said:
> This essay doesn’t aim to provide a comprehensive and total explanation for differing rates of crime among cities — but it does attempt to provide a novel perspective based on economics, psychology, and culture.
and the conclusion said:
> This framing is not perfect. It has gaps. It is just one way to look at the world.
> Obviously it goes without saying that you can layer on top of this framework meta-level differences in national cultures and national proficiencies, and in the level of background wealth that supports differing levels of state capacity and all sorts of other things.
> “Just increase GDP and add a million jobs and provide great access to those jobs, plus great education, while reducing cultural encouragement of any violent act” is a hell of a pitch. It would maybe work. I’m not sure what sort of an elite would be necessary to enact such a world, nor what the character of elite such a world would select for. A friend just visited Singapore and tells me it’s nice, though I’m not sure paying $100k for the temporary privilege of owning a car appeals to me.
> Regardless, rearchitecting our society is a project for the utopians — my own project with these essays is more suited to the mundane, to analyzing the world and describing it clearly and without varnish.
The essay is intended to be a tool in the arsenal of interested readers when confronted with certain objective data and asked to figure out what is going on and why. I take it for granted that readers will also be familiar with the broader literature and have no need for me to restate commonly repeated arguments & data points.
My ex is a full professor of criminology at a top-tier program, so I learned quite a bit about what pros think about the causes of crime. Much of it is counterintuitive, which is one of the reasons the FBI list has some odd, even critical gaps.
"Strain theory" (ex is a specialist) posits that crime is a kind of social mirroring or game theory choice: not only are victims of crime more likely to be victims of multiple crimes, *even when other factors are accounted for*, but criminals are more likely to be victims of crime, *mostly before they started committing crimes themselves*. In other words, crime has elements of an arms race about it. Not only does crime become an acceptable choice, but it is *necessary*, as your essay hints at, in terms of what Lil Wayne would call "the real world". Put another way, the difficulty of using firearms in Britain has made it *less necessary* for criminals to carry firearms. Most criminals victimize loved ones; most of the rest victimize other criminals.
Interesting, thanks for sharing and I think that makes a lot of sense.
One thing I hear from professionals & academics involved in studying crime a lot is the angle of "most crime is xyz", similar to what you describe, and that *therefore* it is worth focusing our attention on xyz, since that is the majority of crime. But from the perspective of a non-criminal, aka most of society, crime committed against other criminals is of low interest, even if such crime does tend to further criminalize its victims. By virtue of being outside the law themselves, criminals have less recourse to the legal system and necessarily turn to extra-legal justice.
Crime committed against non-criminal strangers captures the public eye and the media attention and the levers of public policy, and I believe that this is actually a very rational response, because such crime is committed upon people who are effectively "wards of the state" in terms of their defense. If non-criminal citizens are allowed to be victimized by the state, the state bears *more* culpability than if a criminal citizen is victimized, because a criminal has used their agency to step outside the bounds of the law & massively increase their own risks.
I'm not writing this response particularly eloquently, but I just wish more academics acknowledged that it is perfectly correct & rational to focus outsized attention on the victimization of non-criminals.
"Thankfully, internet spaceships aren’t real and the potential for purely-digital unplanned violence is part of the game’s niche appeal. Which means I can say without reservation: a scoreboard that shows the world you have been previously victimized increases the likelihood you will be victimized in the present. In game."
Hey now, let's not discount the large quantity of internet spaceships that my 16 year old self stole. A snuggly scoreboard can be useful.
I was ready to quit this article once I tried to parse the Course of Honors diagram as I'm not a history or Latin buff. However, the rest of the article is tremendously engaging as someone who fits the TDTPT profile and who is intimately familiar with the seal at the end of the article. Now that I'm dealing with having kids of my own, I am fully engulfed by the struggle to imbue kids with desire to succeed academically, and yet help them understand that some level is social aggressiveness is required not to be taken advantage of in perpetuity. I suppose it might be time to try out EVE Online at long last and put that on the list of approved kids education apps.
Your mileage may vary, don't send me any formal complaints if EVE doesn't work out!
But thank you for pushing through, I know the Latin names on the diagram are awkward to read & forgettable, I sort of intended it just to be skimmed. I'm glad you enjoyed the rest of the piece. And you're right -- a lot of the subtext for this essay comes from thinking about my own childhood and how best to raise my young son, which memes to attempt to infect him with and which to try to shield him from.
If an economic system that selects strongly for the Desire To Pass Tests leads to elevated levels of violence, shouldn’t Japan be a rather more violent place? Are the elites of SF and NYC or DC really so different on this metric?
The econo-politico-culturo-demographic background of each nation is so distinct, particularly Japan, that cross-nation comparisons on a single axis are bound to look off.
You're right that Japan selects for compliance & conformity to a degree unimaginable in the US. It's a wonderful country and I love going, but I could never thrive living there. For various reasons that I've probably not fully considered, the Japanese often view harsh punishment of those who fail to comply as not just "acceptable" but "correct". I'm over-simplifying a deeply complex cultural divide, but the value systems really are different. One funny thing I've seen among personal friends is one perspective towards state-directed violence expressed in America, but a very different perspective expressed about Japan. That is: an earnest, non-hypocritical, belief that one set of actions *is* appropriate in Japan, but would be deeply inappropriate in America.
I've not really thought more deeply about what's behind that, and perhaps it's unique to a couple friends of mine?
Either way, I'm happy to concede that the topic is deeply complex and my lens from this essay merely one perspective.
It's nice seeing TLP/HC, they were gripping reads the first time and having someone point them out in regards to world-defining businesses/cities makes me feel better about dropping them in random group chats.
Something I always joke about: A boxer is someone who must, fundamentally, like getting punched in the face way more than a regular guy.
There are movements to bring agentic violence back, SF's Course-defining elites are trying. PG says you should spar, Zuck doing BJJ, etc. Mutually agreed-to, hand-to-hand combat lessons seems pretty quixotic in the grand scheme, it's softened for TDTPT audiences. This is all in your Batman thread: Go train karate in the mountains and then only do defensive Wow What a Coincidence Violence! The BJJ student went away sad when he heard about self-defense... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd8dVlZ6hwY&pp=ygUaam9ja28gd2lsbGluayBzZWxmIGRlZmVuc2U%3D)
On the other hand, there's a ground-up appreciation for violence in the curriculum as well. There's a phrase I've heard schoolkids use: "Bring back bullying." I don't think most active internet contributors are old enough to have had a bunch of school-yard fights, a few people I know have one or two, but the generation above mine seems to have these stories in spades. Obviously this could just be my own milieu. Ender's Game makes a specific point of discussing cyberbullying ("Bernard stares at butts - GOD"), that kind of conflict can't be totally new, but it's surprising to see just how one-sided it is nowadays. Handling online bullying (and use of technicalities/administrators by bullies) is so obviously a part of the Course of Honors that it might explain why schools do little to curb tech use in schools. The equilibrium has been solved, and it ain't pretty.
All of this is small-ball in the scheme of Big Tech/national wars, but nearly all my hometown cyberbullies are now politicians , so maybe not! Slow growth -> TDTPT over TATPT -> asceticism over agency -> slow growth means I can rant about anything in the loop and hope to make gains!
Indeed, one question: "what's the difference between bullying and socialization?"
One answer: "how much you cry afterwards"
Another answer: "who's doing it to you? who, whom"
When they say "school is great for socialization", you can parse it as "school is great for bullying" and get all the same semantic value, perhaps even more. It's more honest.
And there IS bullying in real life. Adults bully each other. Politics is bullying, whether on the election campaign or in the Big Tech corporate office. "School is bullying" codes as "School teaches you how to bully and how to be bullied, but also how NOT to be bullied"
Perhaps all the above are true? It was for me.
The best self-defense IS running away.
But also, the sad lesson of the schoolyard or of the PUBG lobby or the EVE online system is: you can never FULLY protect yourself. It's impossible to make yourself perfectly safe. You can't ever guarantee total safety for your own person, let alone your family's. The only solace is the choice presented above in the essay: seek enlightenment and accept your position, or make a pact of relentless & cruel retribution with a few buddies. There's no other salve for the psyche, no other cure for the neuroticism of knowing you can't escape your own victimization. The bullies are waiting for you on the playground.
After a re-read of the essay, it's quite fun to compare with something like SpecOps/SEALs (whose Course of Honors TracingWoodgrains compared favorably to Harvard admissions.) TW's arguments is basically the prioritizing of ATPT. There's no surprise that violence is part of the curriculum and there's huge variance in the members of the team in terms of temperament.
Most importantly, there's no surprise when team members exit for one reason or another. Based on cadences you can find on YouTube, my estimated ratio for "lyrics where good guys win"/"lyrics where good guys die" is about 5:1. There's no lyrics about doing a poor job and not dying, so that leaves out all people kicked off. Compare that to an HR orientation! Excepting Netflix and other parts of tech/finance of course.
Basically, the denial of "You are never perfectly safe" is such a weird position for a people/state/government to be in, and leads to the position of "all violence is sanctioned by the state." A willingness to admit "Look, sometimes violence happens and then we can attempt to exact punishment later, but it's in your hands not ours, feel free to play defense in the grey areas of the map" buys you so much more coherent positions than "Any and all violence is impossible in our lands" that it seems worth buying into. This is obviously the psychology of America/Google culture/elite cities/elites, who have correctly centralized and are kicking ass across the board. But the libertarians deserve some credit for their views, simply because they are often the only ones whose views immediately prompt the question of "What happens if ten guys try to invade your town?" while most others get to dodge completely. Unsurprisingly, I think experience with either "The town was ransacked by 10 guys" or "The town was ransacked by local marshmallow test administrators" brings you to have grey areas on your map.
This article is funny, and maybe partially correct about something, but the problem is that the biggest factor responsible for differences in crime between locations in the US is the presence of Blacks. Blacks commit so much more crime than rest of the population that their presence tends to determine crime rates to a large extent. This is the reason why red states have more homicides than blue states. Hispanics also contribute to high crime rates to a lesser extent. Whites with college education and Asians act as crime minimizers for any location.
Now, the interesting thing about San Francisco is that their crime rate is in fact too high for their demographic largely made up of Whites and Asians with college education. San Francisco has too many homicides, violent crime and property crime for its demographics. This fits with the idea that San Francisco has an elite that is particularly weak on crime. If we compare San Francisco with Austin and Boston, we see that Austin has much less homicide, violent crime and property crime, despite having more Blacks and Hispanics, while Boston has slightly more homicide, but less overall violent crime and less property crime, despite 22% of its population being Black, which is almost a miracle. The obvious problem that appears with the theory that San Francisco crime is the result of having elites with Desire To Pass Test, is that there is no reason to assume that Austin and Boston have different elites, given the fact that they are both also academic and tech hubs. On the other hand, some of the most criminal cities in the US are not academic and tech hubs like San Francisco, Austin and Boston, but they do have a lot of Blacks.
Another factor against this theory is that a few decades ago, both Democrats and Republicans agreed to tough-on-crime laws, and recently many soft-on-crime laws have been reversed. International comparison is also evidence against this theory, because East Asian countries have the most test-oriented cultures in the world, and yet, they have extremely low levels of violence and disorder.
Per my essay on Macroeconomics for Software engineers, tech is a monopolistic winner-take-all game. Satellite offices get put in regional areas to hoover up whatever talent may be left in said regions but unwilling to move to SF, but anyone serious about climbing the Course of Honors makes the pilgrimage to the Bay Area for at least a few years.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I appreciate your comment and your acknowledgement that there is something interesting about SF, but I'm entirely uninterested in discussing Culture War adjacent demographic factors that all the worst people online love to argue about. The fact that San Francisco saw a sustained 50-70% drop in crimes from theft to rape in a single two month period is DEEPLY interesting. The demographics of the city itself did not change in that period, yet the crimes rates changed MASSIVELY. While it has occurred over a much longer time period, you'll doubtless also be aware that homicide rates within-race have changed significantly in America over the last 200 years -- again suggesting that a naïve & edgy faux-race-science view of such rates as "fixed" is cope.
> International comparison is also evidence against this theory, because East Asian countries have the most test-oriented cultures in the world, and yet, they have extremely low levels of violence and disorder
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to argue at me about the differences between different demographic groups and their own natural rates of crime, then go ahead. But you have to then be consistent and acknowledge that such factors would hypothetically make international comparisons meaningless -- it is only when other factors are held constant that the things I discussed in this essay can be analyzed. Which, again, is why November 2023 in San Francisco is so fascinating.
To quote my own essay:
> This framing is not perfect. It has gaps. It is just one way to look at the world.
> Obviously it goes without saying that you can layer on top of this framework meta-level differences in national cultures and national proficiencies, and in the level of background wealth that supports differing levels of state capacity and all sorts of other things.
Some people love to argue about unchangeable demographic factors or vague systemic problems with no hope of solving them. I'm not interested in joining in and I find such conversations today to be mostly lacking in original intellectual content. You can read Yarvin or Carlisle or Kipling or Conrad if you want your edgy 1800s intellectual analysis of different peoples. I'm trying to articulate something that hasn't been said before. Whether I succeed in that is up for debate, of course :)
> You can read Yarvin or Carlisle or Kipling or Conrad if you want your edgy 1800s intellectual analysis of different peoples. I'm trying to articulate something that hasn't been said before. Whether I succeed in that is up for debate, of course :)
So, I'll start at the end just to clarify my view on these things. I think crime is solvable. Of the names I recognize from those you mention, I don't find any particularly insightful, but that's my personal opinion and obviously others disagree. I started reading your articles very recently, and I appreciate your originality, but I won't avoid articulating my disagreements just because I enjoy reading your articles, and I don't even think you expect that from your readers.
> Per my essay on Macroeconomics for Software engineers, tech is a monopolistic winner-take-all game. Satellite offices get put in regional areas to hoover up whatever talent may be left in said regions but unwilling to move to SF, but anyone serious about climbing the Course of Honors makes the pilgrimage to the Bay Area for at least a few years.
San Francisco is more prominent in the tech and particularly software sector, but that doesn't change the fact that Boston and Austin elites are also strong performers in academic tests. Tests, of course, are not just used to select people in tech, but in all sorts of sectors like finance, law, academia and medicine.
I don't think it's necessarily implausible that there is some selection going on with San Francisco elites, perhaps more left-wing people move to a city famous for being very left-wing, or perhaps people less bothered by crime and disorder move to a city famous for crime and disorder. I just don't think Desire To Pass Test is the factor here, because elites having a Desire To Pass Test is the norm for elites in the US and probably the rich world, if not beyond. The idea that San Francisco elites have a different psychological profile because they have an especially strong Desire To Pass Test sounds implausible. Another consideration here is that there are cities in the Bay Area without the crime and disorder of San Francisco.
>The fact that San Francisco saw a sustained 50-70% drop in crimes from theft to rape in a single two month period is DEEPLY interesting.
Yeah, it's more evidence that law enforcement works. Add this to the giant pile of evidence in favor of policing and incarceration. The US reduced its violent crime rate by incarcerating criminals in the 1990s. Just recently, we saw an extreme example of this in El Salvador. El Salvador had one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and now they have a lower homicide rate than the US, all thanks to Bukele's mass incarceration of gangs. Bukele is extremely popular with the people of El Salvador because of this.
So crime rates aren't fixed, you can bring them down dramatically, it's just that you need police and prisons to do that, and not midnight basketball.
> You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to argue at me about the differences between different demographic groups and their own natural rates of crime, then go ahead. But you have to then be consistent and acknowledge that such factors would hypothetically make international comparisons meaningless -- it is only when other factors are held constant that the things I discussed in this essay can be analyzed. Which, again, is why November 2023 in San Francisco is so fascinating.
I didn't say anything about natural, it's just a fact that nowadays in the US Blacks commit much more crime than non-Blacks, and that college-educated Whites and Asians commit the least crime, attributing naturalness to these statistics is unnecessary.
But ok, so let me try to clarify my point. Assuming demographic blindness, assuming that we just ignore racial and ethnic demographic differences, then East Asian countries are strong evidence against your theory, because like I said, you don't get more test oriented than them.
Now, let's assume we take into account racial and ethnic demographic differences, I would still argue that East Asian countries go against your theory. Why? Because they are orderly and strong against crime even in the context of a low crime baseline. It's not like Japan and Singapore have relaxed criminal laws and no one goes to prison, but it just happens that the criminal element of their populations is small, so they don't end up with high crime. No, they are tough on crime even if there aren't that many criminals around.
And here is where I will agree with part of your idea. It's obvious that San Francisco elites, and not just San Francisco elites, are weak on crime and order. I remember a video, I think from San Francisco, but maybe it was a city nearby, showing how people were taking the bus without paying the fare, and the people doing this were everyone, including old ethnic Chinese people. This is an example of disorder spreading due to weak enforcement. NYC now has a huge problem with people not paying subway fares, and again it's due to weak enforcement. My contention is merely that the cause of this weak enforcement is ideology.
I appreciate your comment & would encourage a more Straussian reading of my essay in some regards. You are of course right that I don't mind disagreements at all.
That policing can reduce crime is not challenged at all -- in fact it's highly supported by the 2023 Gavin Crackdown discussed at length. Thus the central issue for me is *why* do some areas choose one level of policing, while other areas choose a different level of policing.
Though many often claim our country is a deeply corrupt oligarchy, and there's some merit to those claims, every part of the policing & justice system is subject to democratic control in some way or another. Thus: San Francisco has the level of policing it does *because* it in some sense desires those outcomes. However, we just saw an external factor cause a change in those desires without sparking a revolution -- that was interesting. My read of all this is that there was/is an "unspeakable personal preference" for heavier policing within the city, however most of the population felt they could not act on their personal preference, even if it resulted in personal suffering.
Having a personal preference that you must sublimate to personal detriment is a defining character trait of the modal multi-national Big Tech monopoly employee, particularly those who are selected to work at HQ. Thus this essay is in many ways an attempt to unpack all that.
Your position that the cause of differences in enforcement is "ideology" is fair (fare?) and reasonable, but I find it doesn't go deep enough. If the ideology you hint at was *truly* held, then Gavin Newsom would've been run out of town and the police I photographed would have caused massive marches in the street. It's not like the citizens of SF have not conducted multiple street marches in the last few years. But none of that happened. The opposite, in many ways -- people made noises about living in a police state but were, by and large, quietly supportive of the lowered crime that resulted.
I think all that and more requires a more thorough discussion of the psychology & selection effects that determine the elite in any given city.
I played Eve for a little over 7 years, mostly camping null sec gates. Sometimes solo, sometimes with a small group. Its been years now. I also hunted irl when I was younger and healthy. Eve wasn't the first game where I could be an ambush predator, and it wasn't the last one either. I'm familiar with the experience you mention of the shakes, though its been a long time. With enough exposure and experience the shakes eventually go away, or at least they did for me. Then you can really hunt.
or does the fun morph into a different, other kind of fun? the pursuit of some extrinsic reward? better stats on zkill? eviction bragging rights? better income?
One quibble (I agree with almost everything and the main thrust) the Roman course of honour was about honour not money; it could impoverish the person pursuing - paying for public games etc
Here in America we take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt for even the STEM degrees. At least those are repaid with earnings, assuming you stay out of academia. The journalism majors, on the other hand....
Still, you're right. Money matters most in America. Fitting, is it not?
This is a fascinating article that I'll be thinking about for a long time. Thanks for writing it. One thing that has been sticking in my head in particular is the idea that Lil' Wayne has TDTPT, otherwise he wouldn't have gained the status that he has in his particular milieu. It's just the tests he has had access to are not the same as the ones that the lawyer and the judge do. I suppose it's more similar to your Venice example.
Ha! Thank you -- and I love when I get a comment that touches on something I ultimately cut out to save space in the essay. You are exactly right. After all:
Lil Wayne ultimately lost the court case in question, which is no surprise. But one has to wonder: how *did* TMZ get ahold of this tape? Who sent it to them? Is there not an intense irony to a dopey lawyer trying to verbally trap Wayne on camera into admitting to "trying to portray a gangster image" and failing -- while simultaneously being verbally abused and threatened on camera? Whose image is bolstered by such a tape leaking? In this way, Wayne loses the court case but cements the loyalty of his fans and ensures many more album sales to come. Wayne and the Lawyer had to ascend VERY different Courses of Honor to get to where they are, but make no mistake, Wayne is a master of his own craft and has had to pass far harder tests than this lawyer in order to make it.
I'm not sure there's an intense irony, though I get what you're saying. I think it's quite typical of most people from the lawyer strata of society to not think in the way that we are thinking: Lil' Wayne deserves to be recognized as being in the upper eschelons of *his* society, in the same way that Gavin Newsom recognizes that Xi Jinping is in the upper eschelons of Chinese society and deserves respect, regardless of what Newsom might personally feel about how Chinese society is structured or how Jinping uses his power.
Conrad, thanks for sharing your thinking, and for thinking and writing deeply. You noted that your theory leaves some gaps. What do you think of these couple of key attributes of American culture that go unmentioned in your essay? They seem worth mentioning in any culture-based theory of escalation written in 21st century America.
First, many of the top performers in our warrior class loath compliance. For some in the warrior class, violence is about honor and adventure. For others, violence is the ultima ratio in a never-ending monkey dance.
Second, many Americans choose non-violence as a path to their political goals only because they view that path as the singular acceptable path that complies with the dictates of their personal highest authority, God. For the god-fearing, its compliance all the way down, in pursuit of that marshmallow in the sky, the afterlife.
You're welcome & thanks for reading and commenting!
Regarding those two elements you mention: when there are no external limits placed on the conflict, the warrior class that *also* can handle some level of compliance totally wipes the floor with the one that can't. That goes for ancient warfare and modern policing alike. In my view, the existence of certain types who enjoy & indulge in violence qua violence, for its own sake, therefore tends to be contingent on the restraining or excommunicating people who can handle both compliance & violence.
On the second, yes, and you're not the first commenter to mention the Christian element here. Obviously I threw the image of Jesus in the essay rather intentionally -- I think the Christian theology plays a huge role in the evolution of modern attitudes, particularly elite/enlightened attitudes, towards violence. "Blessed are the meek..." etc
Great device of summarising the crucial propositions at the start of the essay. In retrospect, I don't know why it isn't ubiquitous.
I think the issue with the essay in general is this:
1) Modern societies are composed of extremely complex systems of regulated coalitions
2) Participation in those coalitions is the best method for the success of the individual, because it allows the individual to use those coalitions / structures of power to extract benefits for himself or herself (e.g. it is reliably lucrative to gain admission to the rent-extracting associations that are the medical professional bodies)
3) Participation means appearing to comply / signalling compliance with the norms of the group
4) A metanorm shared by almost all of the coalitions that represent society is deference to a codified set of norms, which are legitimised by being notionally accepted by consensus, for resolving disputes - rather than doing it through and hoc force (aka the legal system)
5) Thus, suppression of interpersonal violence and recourse to the dispute-resolution mechanisms of the state is a necessary form of signalling in order to belong to most coalitions (e.g. private equity firms), because it signals compliance with a metaset of norms about interpersonal interaction (and that indicates that you're a predictable and reliable counterparty who can participate in complex and sometimes adversarial social relationships without losing your shit and shooting someone)
6) it is also (generally) a more practical form of enforcement (most private equity guys aren't well equipped to translate their mastery of the universe to mastering a larger, dominant male)
7) thus, the tdtpt kids are unconsciously acting as coalition-forming monkeys. They intuitively understand that modern societies are such complex systems of regulated coalitions that complying with the norms of those coalitions is utility maximising and contradicting the norms of those coalitions is utility destroying. You can in fact make a ton of money and have a good life as a hedge fund dick or a Stanford engineer. You're much less likely to do so as a contrarian, puligistic trucker
So the issue really is the extent to which the tdtpt kid has, at the time of submitting to all of these tests, a model of his/her prospects that is quasi-rational and agentic, even if it isn't explicit.
In the case of a kid who is on the path to become a doctor or a management consultant or a partner at EY, in most cases it's fair to say that they really are just blindly submitting to authority, because they've been taught from a young age to do so and to chase affirmation, irrespective of whether they're happy. Why? Because the trade they're making as they study for 18 hours a day or chuckle a shit-eating affirming laugh for their partner isn't worth the reward - (comfortable material life) - it isn't so great as to justify the psychological strictures.
For the guys who make it a level above that (entrepreneur, hedge fund guy, private equity guy, surgeon), they might still be crushed by perfectionism and need for validation, but they attain a greater level of power and dominance, to the extent that they're sufficiently free that they are consciously motivated by social competition - a very old, atavistic, and transparent abstract game of beating the next guy. Here, it's ambiguous, because they were tdtpt in order to reach a point at which they're close to the social apex - they have the resources to exert their will (via direct power or money) over pretty much everyone else in society. That feels rational.
It's definitely not true for the kids who do it consciously as the rational way to maximise their expected return in a complex, regulated society - tests are shit and I'm utterly bored right now, but Porsche GT3s are super cool, and I can't afford one if I go smoke weed and play games.
Thank you! I started doing it in text form with some of my earlier essays after people complained about them being too long and wanting a summary, then I realized with this one that making graphics in Figma is more fun.
Regarding the rest of your comment: excellent comment and I agree wholeheartedly with how you've put it! Well written too. Ultimately you're exactly right: the PE guys and the Big Tech guys all climbed a pretty similar hierarchy and, at a high enough meta level, aced broadly similar tests.
That said: I don't think I'd be thrown out of any PE conferences, nor any Tech conferences, for suggesting that the average PE suit has a higher Disagreeableness personality score than the average Big Tech worker, and is perhaps *marginally* less subservient to dispute-resolution mechanisms that prioritize consensus building, and would perhaps instead be more willing to engage in direct conflict to resolve disputes (which does not mean violence of course) --- and that all of that makes perfect sense given the marginal differences in what it takes to thrive in a Big Tech vs. PE environment.
Struggling tech companies didn't spend the last 24 months sweating in the office and having nightmares about the phrase "Private Equity" for nothing!
At sufficiently high levels of social status, ugly violence is almost *never* something you want to actually engage in yourself. It is done on your behalf or it is done to you. The question as it relates to Private Equity vs. Big Tech is therefore: if you polled Private Equity workers on their support of heavy handed policing, would they be more or less in favor than Big Tech workers?
I have only a very small personal network in each of those domains myself, but my low-n network does suggest a difference between the two! And that difference breaks in favor of the more conflict-happy group being more amenable to violence done "on their behalf" by the state, and feeling less shame in stating that publicly to an unknown audience.
I'm curious if you'd agree or if you have a different perspective? (You happened to pick two careers here where I have had some experience & do know different people, but I don't have any particular insight into other industries)
(edit: I replied a little before you finished your comment, but yes, I would dearly love a GT3 ;) )
I think the correct model is probably one that stratifies (males) according to their ability to be dominant in coalitions.
As a toy model - if we imagine the psychology of monkeys, the mid-tier monkeys are ones that have to rely on reciprocal bonds and allegiances with others to a greater extent, so their ability to exert control over the world is bounded, their behaviour is subject to greater regulation by the group, and instinctively they limit aggressive behaviour. The converse is true of dominant males (at the margins; the effect sizes might not be that large).
Big-tech workers are no doubt at the far right of the IQ distribution, but someone who's just another product manager or engineer at FAANG is one of the mid-tier monkeys who accepts and participates in the coalition (whether it be the firm or society at large), without seeking to exert dominance over it.
PE is and always has been a more classically masculine, overtly competitive, overtly dominant industry. It isn't that much different from competitive sports as a modern way for males to compete with each other and express dominance, in a socially acceptable way. It is quintessentially concerned with getting the upper hand in a range of relationships with counterparties that are more adversarial than cooperative (e.g. the guys below you who want more of the carry pool, the seller of an asset that you want to buy, the buyer of an asset that you want to sell, etc). PE is about consistently succeeding in situations of direct conflict of interests.
PE selects for dominant males, and ones who succeed in PE are dominant among dominant males, they've spent their lives in situations of conflict, so they have no problem with exerting their will in situations of conflict (even if vicarious). FAANG people are midtier or more cooperative monkeys, so we should expect them to be biased to dispute resolution through established mechanisms, through consensus, through cooperation, etc.
My mother once made me do the marshmallow test when I was a kid. Out of pure spite I ate it immediately.
In primary I bought into compliance out of misguided belief that this was virtuous. Seeing how the anarcho-tyranny lite rewarded me (favored degenerates) made me an anti-regime maverick ever since.
A close analogy for what's happened then is Severian from Book of the New Sun. I dream now of nothing but being autarch - a law unto myself.
Such dreams are an entirely reasonable response to perceiving the system to have failed you.
The combination of such dreams with the unshirkable weight of responsibility for others is at the root of all great state formation. The first lord or baron or king or emperor simply does what he must. It is in this same way that Machiavelli described the men who "give laws to the people from nothing" as the greatest of all men, though I didn't touch on it explicitly in my book review of Discourses on Livy.
> "to genuine believers, they truly represent psychological transcendence over base personal desire and lack of power. To others, they represent submission and impotence. Self-mastery vs. mastery of others. Each perspective seems alien to the other."
Loved the whole essay, but this especially. Viewed in isolation, one might conclude that this is an essay about Christianity. And maybe it is? In City of God, Augustine contrasts three possible motivations for a person. Within the "city of man", there are pursuit of glory for one's earthly city (early Rome) and pursuit of self-interest (late Rome). Within the "city of God", there is the pursuit of self-abandonment out of love for God. One might view our modern Course of Honors as the final form of what you get when you try to develop a Course of Honors paradoxically around self-abasement.
You are very right to accuse me of writing a 10k word essay with an entire unstated subtext. I mostly write these softer pieces when I sit down to write a more technical essay and realize I first need to frame my cultural disagreements before I talk about the numbers.
The Christianity angle is an interesting one. Certainly it's at the heart of much of our national moral philosophy (hence the Batman Begins tweet snippet). Should you or should you not try to build the City of God in the present day world? Should you attempt to Immanentize the eschaton? A good Christian answer seems obvious here.
That said, to spoil it for you & any brave readers who make it ALL the way down here, the subtext buried in this essay is about the role of sanctions in geopolitics and congressional approvals for war. I'll leave it at that for now lest I disincentivize myself from actually writing the thing.
Harpham's "The Ascetic Imperative" is a masterful examination of the idea that Western culture, specifically after Christ, is a history of ascetic impulses.
This essay has been the first essay I've read in a long time that gave me some truly novel insights and I want to thank you for it. Thank you for writing this. It brought me back to the old internet back when we could still discuss interesting ideas in depth.
I have a few random thoughts I want to share that are prompted by this article. It's a long article and my thoughts might be a little jumbled but y'all can take them or leave them as you see fit.
First, because it's freshest on my mind, a simple note about you mentioning that the arson data for San Francisco seems weird. I moved away years ago, I don't know if it's still like this. But when I lived in San Francisco it became clear to me, paying close attention to local happenings and reading between some lines, that a significant fraction of arson in San Francisco is political in nature. I'm talking things like "the fancy luxury condo development mysteriously burned down overnight" kind of things. I suspected this for a while, but became convinced during a random conversation with my at-the-time girlfriend's mom. Her mom was a radical activist from the 80s and she once flippantly said "the protestors these days have no balls. Back in the 80s, when we were fighting gentrification, we burned things down". The casual and confident way she said this made me believe that she was serious. I have no idea to what extent this would skew the arson numbers for San Francisco, but if San Francisco is an outlier relative to other cities on that metric, this might explain that
Second, speaking of ex-girlfriends' mothers, I had a different ex-girlfriend whose parents were both US Federal employees in northern Virginia. I never quite had the vocabulary to describe exactly what I thought their character flaws were, but you have hit the nail perfectly on the head with this essay. In short (and I hope this is a charitable and accurate summary of one of your points): her mother was exactly the kind of TDTPT bureaucrat who has completely and totally subjugated her personal will to the incentive framework of her superiors, and who has internalized the "de-escalate conflict over all else" framing you laid out above, including the sort of condescending pity of "they're just like that".
This is something that I have struggled to understand for a long time. Like, I can fully and totally understand the priority placed on non-violent de-escalation, walking away from conflicts, etc. As a very non-aggressive man, that is what I usually do, and it makes sense to me. But what I have never been able to understand or make my peace with, is why a pass is given to some people to break these norms. Why it seems, for instance, that the property criminals in San Francisco can get away with break-ins, muggings, and thefts, and the people like my ex's mom will blame the victim for not securing their car, but if _I_ were to break in and mug them, they'd use the full weight of the state's violence to destroy my life without a second thought.
It's especially baffling to me, because one of the conventional culture-war explanations for this is essentially "the people taking this condescending, victim-blaming attitude are so privileged that they can isolate themselves from most of these violent consequences, and so they do not experience the actual harms when they're moralizing". Eg, they live in the suburbs so _their_ cars never get broken into. However, in my experience, this is clearly untrue. The people doing this moralizing in SF, for example, have all been mugged and robbed before, and I don't understand what social or material benefit they get that is so strong that they feel no desire whatsoever to materially improve the safety and quality of life standards of where they live. The best explanation I've been able to come up with is that they've elevated Christian style 'turn-the-other-cheek' almost into a fetish, and they get off on it. This is obviously an uncharitable and unsatisfying explanation.
Finally, my third thought is to observe an intense negative personal reaction to reading much of this essay. At the risk of oversharing, I am (or perhaps was) an extremely high TDTPT person. In fact, in my highschool I was the highest achieving student in the 40 year history of the school. I "did everything right", I "followed the rules", I "made the authority happy". I am not successful in any of the ways you lay out for the elites in this article. I don't have any understanding of why this system, which appears to be tailor-made to elevate people like me, has failed me so hard. But I can tell you, these days, I no longer have any desire to past tests, and I actively snub the noses of authority figures. _That_ dynamic I can explain easily: the system has failed me, and I see no reason to subordinate myself to it when there is no payoff. Still, I struggle greatly with trying to understand how it go to this point.
Thank you, I'm glad you enjoyed it -- I enjoyed writing it!
Re: arson -- yes, my own model of the world mirrors yours, and I sort of view it as one potential "voice of the unheard" type response from certain factions, which is why I floated it going up in response to heavy handed police crackdowns as one potential hypothesis. I don't think we'll ever get the data to really say. But some people do indeed seem to like setting things on fire in response to undesirable political action.
Re: "northern Virginia" character types...I can only smile. And it makes perfect sense to me, in the context of this essay, why those types rise up the ranks of our bureaucracies so smoothly.
I actually cut about 2k words out of this essay digging further on this thread because I thought it was a bit too tangential from my main point, but if you'll forgive me for posting it back here, minus cool images that you'll have to imagine:
__________
Different Ways To Climb The Ladder
There’s another group of children who pass the same test without needing to transcend their body’s natural instincts: the ones who simply don’t eat the marshmallow because they didn’t care to.
For them, the non-aggression principle ALSO makes a ton of sense and so you can expect to see some initial agreement on responsible norms between these two groups.
To outsiders, it may even be tough to tell them apart. They are not following the Cardinal Rule of Elite Status. They are following their own rule: the Iron Rule of Violence: anything that gets started has the potential to go all the way.
If someone does start a conflict, this second group of kids — who otherwise blend in seamlessly with the high Desire To Pass Tests kids on account of their test-acing skills — will pay no mind whatsoever to the preferences of the system and its administrators.
To say it more clearly: the “test” is whether or not you are involved in violence. Fail this test and you don’t qualify for elite status in America.
Whether you start it or not, your responsibility is always and everywhere to mitigate and deescalate it as an aspiring climber of the elite Course of Honors across almost all domains. To simply be around while it happens is a failing, to be a part of it is damning.
But note that this test itself does not care whether you aced it by following the Cardinal Rule — never escalate a situation — or by following the Iron Rule — even small acts can escalate, so refrain from making them unless you are committed.
Which means these two sets of kids and everyone on the spectrum between them climb up the Course of Honors with applause. They live and breath amongst each other in perfect harmony. Until…
Code Switching: Beneath the Mask
The key to understand the psyche of “iron rule” kids is to think about how their own ego models someone initiating a minor act of violence against them. In their mind, that other person is opting into a conflict that could turn existential. The high Desire To Pass Tests kids never really consider this possibility, they’re committed to de-escalation from the drop. But the low Desire To Pass Tests kids are well aware of their own potential responses and have no instinctive urge to shy away from responding with aggression of their own.
From their point of view, the instigator of violence has just said to them: “yes, I know this conflict might escalate until one of us is very very upset, but I have nonetheless initiated it. I do so because I expect to dominate you either physically or psychologically.”
Fully appreciating this statement from the perspective of the victimized child and their ego results in a much harsher judgment of the aggressor — regardless of how minor the stakes are!
This kid’s ego has two possible interpretations: I have been attacked because i) they expect me to be a coward, or ii) they don’t think I present a serious threat. Both of these massive ego blows sum to perceived impotence.
Impotence manifests as rage.
And in this case, the ego of the child has not been sublimated to external authority. Perceived impotence coupled with direct conflict is a recipe for escalation! And not a small little escalation, but a significant and personal one!
Minority Report says they just committed zeroth degree murder on you: premeditated future murder of both your body and your soul.
The natural escalation is one that responds to that future potential and not the past action:
And if you understand that psyche and then switch again, back into the point of view of an onlooker with high Desire To Pass Tests, a good boy for whom escalating a conflict if the unforgivable sin, ask: who do they view with more apprehension?
The initiator of conflict — “one of thems” — who they knew well to steer clear of and back down from? Or the kid who seemed like “one of us” and just revealed all of a sudden that he was filled with uncontrollable rage and secretly capable of far worse the whole time!
This is one reason the other kids in Ender’s Game are so consistently horrified by him. He seems quiet and well-socialized and as “normal” as can be at an elite program for gifted kids. And then he unpredictably and radically over-escalates a situation to ensure he wins forever and everyone else goes home in a literal body bag.
He does not believe in the rules of any game — he only appears outwardly to comply to the extent that compliance overlaps with victory.
It is this violation of expectations that results in his condemnation. The child who showed he had the necessary restraint to avoid initiating violence…but then responded with excessive violence of his own, violates expectations in a way that can only ever earn ostracization and condemnation from the rest of one’s elite peers.
Precisely because you can refrain from eating the marshmallow, people expect you not to eat it.
Even when it means you lose the game.
Especially when it means you lose the game.
__________
I think that above segment pattern matches quite nicely with what you described :) Perhaps I ought to have included it as a footnote.
Re: personal struggles with the system -- without knowing specifics, I can't really comment with much accuracy. But I will say, the academic tests themselves are merely a single aspect of the Course of Honors. On their own, they are usually insufficient. A system that elevated people purely based on academic scores would look markedly different to the one we have today (& everyone knows this, however SAYING it aloud is usually a violation of our system's preferences).
But as you say, you "followed the rules" so perhaps you understood this too? But it's not JUST about "not breaking" rules, you need people to like you and want to support you and promote you and invest in you ("mentor" you), and to make that happen you've got to find some dimension along which to market yourself to those with more power than you.
This too is part of the game. You can choose a few different marketing options here, thankfully we are not the USSR, however even for technical roles that do care about quantitative performance, after high school most of these marketing options will have "technically capable" as mere table stakes.
I'm sure it will not have escaped your notice that the "northern Virginia" folks will sublimate personal desires to the system's desires without even thinking of it, will de-escalate any potential violence, will condescend to the less fortunate with "they're just like that" like it's breathing...but will execute the most machiavellian political cruelty upon their peers if the opportunity presents itself, with plausible deniability of course. You are expected to offer condolences to the peer you've just stabbed in the back (metaphorically, of course you merely gave a negative review about one of their direct reports) -- AND they are expected to smile and thank you for them.
The contradictions are part of the game.
The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao may be cynical, but it puts "Clueless" at the bottom and "Sociopaths" at the top of any organizational hierarchy for a reason. Read it if you haven't :)
I think your analysis (interesting though it is) is questionable on multiple points, but I'll focus on the most important one: like almost all discourse on "elites" you fail to define the term. Who are these elites who are so compliant and conflict averse? Elon Musk or Donald Trump or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or CZ don't seem to fit that description!
Thank you Aris. I think the term is best left undefined -- as the definition is contingent on the era & city in question. The way the essay lays it out, the "elite" is the group which rises through established channels to have an outsized impact on society. The way one climbs to elite status through the Politburo in China is obviously rather different from the way one climbs the ladder of corporate finance in New York City, but certain things about both processes generalize.
Standalone "Great Men" of history like Musk or Bezos tend to chart their own course and are not particularly similar to the likes of professionalized elites that I describe in this essay, though they obviously have a tremendous influence on society. It is the difference between a King and his Knights. There is a playbook for how to become a Knight. Less so a King.
Ok, so then you're talking about the managerial class, not the top top of the pyramid. What evidence is there then to support that the characteristics of that class differ in the modern Western world from any other managerial class in history, from Spartan warriors to Athenian orators to Chinese bureaucrat/scholars to the British public school ethos? All were trained to be compliant, disciplined workers.
The essay begins by referencing a piece by Crémieux -- I'd recommend giving it a read, it's worth it!
Unless you think that the SF Big Tech Elites are overrepresented in committing assault, I think the differences are self-evident at that point. It was the springboard for my whole piece really. Why is it that the elites in Venice were violent and aggressive, whereas the elites in San Francisco are predominantly victimized?
Well, first, I don't think you can build a grand theory of violence based on two data points! Second, there are more factors to consider when analysing violence than the character of the perpetrator - one, for instance, being the sanctity of human life, personal liberty etc. Third, are you comparing like for like? Are the elites you're looking at in Venice basically the bureaucrats, or are they the top-dog aristocrats?
Yes, indeed, I also don't think you can build a "grand theory of violence" in this way, which is why the essay's introduction said:
> This essay doesn’t aim to provide a comprehensive and total explanation for differing rates of crime among cities — but it does attempt to provide a novel perspective based on economics, psychology, and culture.
and the conclusion said:
> This framing is not perfect. It has gaps. It is just one way to look at the world.
> Obviously it goes without saying that you can layer on top of this framework meta-level differences in national cultures and national proficiencies, and in the level of background wealth that supports differing levels of state capacity and all sorts of other things.
> “Just increase GDP and add a million jobs and provide great access to those jobs, plus great education, while reducing cultural encouragement of any violent act” is a hell of a pitch. It would maybe work. I’m not sure what sort of an elite would be necessary to enact such a world, nor what the character of elite such a world would select for. A friend just visited Singapore and tells me it’s nice, though I’m not sure paying $100k for the temporary privilege of owning a car appeals to me.
> Regardless, rearchitecting our society is a project for the utopians — my own project with these essays is more suited to the mundane, to analyzing the world and describing it clearly and without varnish.
The essay is intended to be a tool in the arsenal of interested readers when confronted with certain objective data and asked to figure out what is going on and why. I take it for granted that readers will also be familiar with the broader literature and have no need for me to restate commonly repeated arguments & data points.
Fair enough on the disclaimers, but a 10k word essay is hardly an idle shower thought :)
My ex is a full professor of criminology at a top-tier program, so I learned quite a bit about what pros think about the causes of crime. Much of it is counterintuitive, which is one of the reasons the FBI list has some odd, even critical gaps.
"Strain theory" (ex is a specialist) posits that crime is a kind of social mirroring or game theory choice: not only are victims of crime more likely to be victims of multiple crimes, *even when other factors are accounted for*, but criminals are more likely to be victims of crime, *mostly before they started committing crimes themselves*. In other words, crime has elements of an arms race about it. Not only does crime become an acceptable choice, but it is *necessary*, as your essay hints at, in terms of what Lil Wayne would call "the real world". Put another way, the difficulty of using firearms in Britain has made it *less necessary* for criminals to carry firearms. Most criminals victimize loved ones; most of the rest victimize other criminals.
Interesting, thanks for sharing and I think that makes a lot of sense.
One thing I hear from professionals & academics involved in studying crime a lot is the angle of "most crime is xyz", similar to what you describe, and that *therefore* it is worth focusing our attention on xyz, since that is the majority of crime. But from the perspective of a non-criminal, aka most of society, crime committed against other criminals is of low interest, even if such crime does tend to further criminalize its victims. By virtue of being outside the law themselves, criminals have less recourse to the legal system and necessarily turn to extra-legal justice.
Crime committed against non-criminal strangers captures the public eye and the media attention and the levers of public policy, and I believe that this is actually a very rational response, because such crime is committed upon people who are effectively "wards of the state" in terms of their defense. If non-criminal citizens are allowed to be victimized by the state, the state bears *more* culpability than if a criminal citizen is victimized, because a criminal has used their agency to step outside the bounds of the law & massively increase their own risks.
I'm not writing this response particularly eloquently, but I just wish more academics acknowledged that it is perfectly correct & rational to focus outsized attention on the victimization of non-criminals.
"Thankfully, internet spaceships aren’t real and the potential for purely-digital unplanned violence is part of the game’s niche appeal. Which means I can say without reservation: a scoreboard that shows the world you have been previously victimized increases the likelihood you will be victimized in the present. In game."
Hey now, let's not discount the large quantity of internet spaceships that my 16 year old self stole. A snuggly scoreboard can be useful.
HA! The Trojan Horse of Snuggly. I never considered that. Bravo.
I was ready to quit this article once I tried to parse the Course of Honors diagram as I'm not a history or Latin buff. However, the rest of the article is tremendously engaging as someone who fits the TDTPT profile and who is intimately familiar with the seal at the end of the article. Now that I'm dealing with having kids of my own, I am fully engulfed by the struggle to imbue kids with desire to succeed academically, and yet help them understand that some level is social aggressiveness is required not to be taken advantage of in perpetuity. I suppose it might be time to try out EVE Online at long last and put that on the list of approved kids education apps.
Your mileage may vary, don't send me any formal complaints if EVE doesn't work out!
But thank you for pushing through, I know the Latin names on the diagram are awkward to read & forgettable, I sort of intended it just to be skimmed. I'm glad you enjoyed the rest of the piece. And you're right -- a lot of the subtext for this essay comes from thinking about my own childhood and how best to raise my young son, which memes to attempt to infect him with and which to try to shield him from.
If an economic system that selects strongly for the Desire To Pass Tests leads to elevated levels of violence, shouldn’t Japan be a rather more violent place? Are the elites of SF and NYC or DC really so different on this metric?
The econo-politico-culturo-demographic background of each nation is so distinct, particularly Japan, that cross-nation comparisons on a single axis are bound to look off.
You're right that Japan selects for compliance & conformity to a degree unimaginable in the US. It's a wonderful country and I love going, but I could never thrive living there. For various reasons that I've probably not fully considered, the Japanese often view harsh punishment of those who fail to comply as not just "acceptable" but "correct". I'm over-simplifying a deeply complex cultural divide, but the value systems really are different. One funny thing I've seen among personal friends is one perspective towards state-directed violence expressed in America, but a very different perspective expressed about Japan. That is: an earnest, non-hypocritical, belief that one set of actions *is* appropriate in Japan, but would be deeply inappropriate in America.
I've not really thought more deeply about what's behind that, and perhaps it's unique to a couple friends of mine?
Either way, I'm happy to concede that the topic is deeply complex and my lens from this essay merely one perspective.
It's nice seeing TLP/HC, they were gripping reads the first time and having someone point them out in regards to world-defining businesses/cities makes me feel better about dropping them in random group chats.
Something I always joke about: A boxer is someone who must, fundamentally, like getting punched in the face way more than a regular guy.
There are movements to bring agentic violence back, SF's Course-defining elites are trying. PG says you should spar, Zuck doing BJJ, etc. Mutually agreed-to, hand-to-hand combat lessons seems pretty quixotic in the grand scheme, it's softened for TDTPT audiences. This is all in your Batman thread: Go train karate in the mountains and then only do defensive Wow What a Coincidence Violence! The BJJ student went away sad when he heard about self-defense... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd8dVlZ6hwY&pp=ygUaam9ja28gd2lsbGluayBzZWxmIGRlZmVuc2U%3D)
On the other hand, there's a ground-up appreciation for violence in the curriculum as well. There's a phrase I've heard schoolkids use: "Bring back bullying." I don't think most active internet contributors are old enough to have had a bunch of school-yard fights, a few people I know have one or two, but the generation above mine seems to have these stories in spades. Obviously this could just be my own milieu. Ender's Game makes a specific point of discussing cyberbullying ("Bernard stares at butts - GOD"), that kind of conflict can't be totally new, but it's surprising to see just how one-sided it is nowadays. Handling online bullying (and use of technicalities/administrators by bullies) is so obviously a part of the Course of Honors that it might explain why schools do little to curb tech use in schools. The equilibrium has been solved, and it ain't pretty.
All of this is small-ball in the scheme of Big Tech/national wars, but nearly all my hometown cyberbullies are now politicians , so maybe not! Slow growth -> TDTPT over TATPT -> asceticism over agency -> slow growth means I can rant about anything in the loop and hope to make gains!
Thanks as always for another great read.
Of course, and thanks for a good comment :)
Indeed, one question: "what's the difference between bullying and socialization?"
One answer: "how much you cry afterwards"
Another answer: "who's doing it to you? who, whom"
When they say "school is great for socialization", you can parse it as "school is great for bullying" and get all the same semantic value, perhaps even more. It's more honest.
And there IS bullying in real life. Adults bully each other. Politics is bullying, whether on the election campaign or in the Big Tech corporate office. "School is bullying" codes as "School teaches you how to bully and how to be bullied, but also how NOT to be bullied"
Perhaps all the above are true? It was for me.
The best self-defense IS running away.
But also, the sad lesson of the schoolyard or of the PUBG lobby or the EVE online system is: you can never FULLY protect yourself. It's impossible to make yourself perfectly safe. You can't ever guarantee total safety for your own person, let alone your family's. The only solace is the choice presented above in the essay: seek enlightenment and accept your position, or make a pact of relentless & cruel retribution with a few buddies. There's no other salve for the psyche, no other cure for the neuroticism of knowing you can't escape your own victimization. The bullies are waiting for you on the playground.
After a re-read of the essay, it's quite fun to compare with something like SpecOps/SEALs (whose Course of Honors TracingWoodgrains compared favorably to Harvard admissions.) TW's arguments is basically the prioritizing of ATPT. There's no surprise that violence is part of the curriculum and there's huge variance in the members of the team in terms of temperament.
Most importantly, there's no surprise when team members exit for one reason or another. Based on cadences you can find on YouTube, my estimated ratio for "lyrics where good guys win"/"lyrics where good guys die" is about 5:1. There's no lyrics about doing a poor job and not dying, so that leaves out all people kicked off. Compare that to an HR orientation! Excepting Netflix and other parts of tech/finance of course.
Basically, the denial of "You are never perfectly safe" is such a weird position for a people/state/government to be in, and leads to the position of "all violence is sanctioned by the state." A willingness to admit "Look, sometimes violence happens and then we can attempt to exact punishment later, but it's in your hands not ours, feel free to play defense in the grey areas of the map" buys you so much more coherent positions than "Any and all violence is impossible in our lands" that it seems worth buying into. This is obviously the psychology of America/Google culture/elite cities/elites, who have correctly centralized and are kicking ass across the board. But the libertarians deserve some credit for their views, simply because they are often the only ones whose views immediately prompt the question of "What happens if ten guys try to invade your town?" while most others get to dodge completely. Unsurprisingly, I think experience with either "The town was ransacked by 10 guys" or "The town was ransacked by local marshmallow test administrators" brings you to have grey areas on your map.
TLDR: I like the Batman thread.
Indeed -- as I said at the end of Ouroboros Theory: “There are no Libertarians in the Jungle”
It turns out that the acknowledgement that there IS a jungle in the first place ought not to be taken for granted.
This article is funny, and maybe partially correct about something, but the problem is that the biggest factor responsible for differences in crime between locations in the US is the presence of Blacks. Blacks commit so much more crime than rest of the population that their presence tends to determine crime rates to a large extent. This is the reason why red states have more homicides than blue states. Hispanics also contribute to high crime rates to a lesser extent. Whites with college education and Asians act as crime minimizers for any location.
Now, the interesting thing about San Francisco is that their crime rate is in fact too high for their demographic largely made up of Whites and Asians with college education. San Francisco has too many homicides, violent crime and property crime for its demographics. This fits with the idea that San Francisco has an elite that is particularly weak on crime. If we compare San Francisco with Austin and Boston, we see that Austin has much less homicide, violent crime and property crime, despite having more Blacks and Hispanics, while Boston has slightly more homicide, but less overall violent crime and less property crime, despite 22% of its population being Black, which is almost a miracle. The obvious problem that appears with the theory that San Francisco crime is the result of having elites with Desire To Pass Test, is that there is no reason to assume that Austin and Boston have different elites, given the fact that they are both also academic and tech hubs. On the other hand, some of the most criminal cities in the US are not academic and tech hubs like San Francisco, Austin and Boston, but they do have a lot of Blacks.
Another factor against this theory is that a few decades ago, both Democrats and Republicans agreed to tough-on-crime laws, and recently many soft-on-crime laws have been reversed. International comparison is also evidence against this theory, because East Asian countries have the most test-oriented cultures in the world, and yet, they have extremely low levels of violence and disorder.
> there is no reason to assume that Austin and Boston have different elites,
Assume? I'm not assuming it, I know it. Here's a list of tech companies by market cap, let me know when you find one headquartered in Austin: https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-by-market-cap/
Per my essay on Macroeconomics for Software engineers, tech is a monopolistic winner-take-all game. Satellite offices get put in regional areas to hoover up whatever talent may be left in said regions but unwilling to move to SF, but anyone serious about climbing the Course of Honors makes the pilgrimage to the Bay Area for at least a few years.
Regarding the rest of your comment, I appreciate your comment and your acknowledgement that there is something interesting about SF, but I'm entirely uninterested in discussing Culture War adjacent demographic factors that all the worst people online love to argue about. The fact that San Francisco saw a sustained 50-70% drop in crimes from theft to rape in a single two month period is DEEPLY interesting. The demographics of the city itself did not change in that period, yet the crimes rates changed MASSIVELY. While it has occurred over a much longer time period, you'll doubtless also be aware that homicide rates within-race have changed significantly in America over the last 200 years -- again suggesting that a naïve & edgy faux-race-science view of such rates as "fixed" is cope.
> International comparison is also evidence against this theory, because East Asian countries have the most test-oriented cultures in the world, and yet, they have extremely low levels of violence and disorder
You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to argue at me about the differences between different demographic groups and their own natural rates of crime, then go ahead. But you have to then be consistent and acknowledge that such factors would hypothetically make international comparisons meaningless -- it is only when other factors are held constant that the things I discussed in this essay can be analyzed. Which, again, is why November 2023 in San Francisco is so fascinating.
To quote my own essay:
> This framing is not perfect. It has gaps. It is just one way to look at the world.
> Obviously it goes without saying that you can layer on top of this framework meta-level differences in national cultures and national proficiencies, and in the level of background wealth that supports differing levels of state capacity and all sorts of other things.
Some people love to argue about unchangeable demographic factors or vague systemic problems with no hope of solving them. I'm not interested in joining in and I find such conversations today to be mostly lacking in original intellectual content. You can read Yarvin or Carlisle or Kipling or Conrad if you want your edgy 1800s intellectual analysis of different peoples. I'm trying to articulate something that hasn't been said before. Whether I succeed in that is up for debate, of course :)
> You can read Yarvin or Carlisle or Kipling or Conrad if you want your edgy 1800s intellectual analysis of different peoples. I'm trying to articulate something that hasn't been said before. Whether I succeed in that is up for debate, of course :)
So, I'll start at the end just to clarify my view on these things. I think crime is solvable. Of the names I recognize from those you mention, I don't find any particularly insightful, but that's my personal opinion and obviously others disagree. I started reading your articles very recently, and I appreciate your originality, but I won't avoid articulating my disagreements just because I enjoy reading your articles, and I don't even think you expect that from your readers.
> Per my essay on Macroeconomics for Software engineers, tech is a monopolistic winner-take-all game. Satellite offices get put in regional areas to hoover up whatever talent may be left in said regions but unwilling to move to SF, but anyone serious about climbing the Course of Honors makes the pilgrimage to the Bay Area for at least a few years.
San Francisco is more prominent in the tech and particularly software sector, but that doesn't change the fact that Boston and Austin elites are also strong performers in academic tests. Tests, of course, are not just used to select people in tech, but in all sorts of sectors like finance, law, academia and medicine.
I don't think it's necessarily implausible that there is some selection going on with San Francisco elites, perhaps more left-wing people move to a city famous for being very left-wing, or perhaps people less bothered by crime and disorder move to a city famous for crime and disorder. I just don't think Desire To Pass Test is the factor here, because elites having a Desire To Pass Test is the norm for elites in the US and probably the rich world, if not beyond. The idea that San Francisco elites have a different psychological profile because they have an especially strong Desire To Pass Test sounds implausible. Another consideration here is that there are cities in the Bay Area without the crime and disorder of San Francisco.
>The fact that San Francisco saw a sustained 50-70% drop in crimes from theft to rape in a single two month period is DEEPLY interesting.
Yeah, it's more evidence that law enforcement works. Add this to the giant pile of evidence in favor of policing and incarceration. The US reduced its violent crime rate by incarcerating criminals in the 1990s. Just recently, we saw an extreme example of this in El Salvador. El Salvador had one of the highest homicide rates in the world, and now they have a lower homicide rate than the US, all thanks to Bukele's mass incarceration of gangs. Bukele is extremely popular with the people of El Salvador because of this.
So crime rates aren't fixed, you can bring them down dramatically, it's just that you need police and prisons to do that, and not midnight basketball.
> You can't have your cake and eat it too. If you want to argue at me about the differences between different demographic groups and their own natural rates of crime, then go ahead. But you have to then be consistent and acknowledge that such factors would hypothetically make international comparisons meaningless -- it is only when other factors are held constant that the things I discussed in this essay can be analyzed. Which, again, is why November 2023 in San Francisco is so fascinating.
I didn't say anything about natural, it's just a fact that nowadays in the US Blacks commit much more crime than non-Blacks, and that college-educated Whites and Asians commit the least crime, attributing naturalness to these statistics is unnecessary.
But ok, so let me try to clarify my point. Assuming demographic blindness, assuming that we just ignore racial and ethnic demographic differences, then East Asian countries are strong evidence against your theory, because like I said, you don't get more test oriented than them.
Now, let's assume we take into account racial and ethnic demographic differences, I would still argue that East Asian countries go against your theory. Why? Because they are orderly and strong against crime even in the context of a low crime baseline. It's not like Japan and Singapore have relaxed criminal laws and no one goes to prison, but it just happens that the criminal element of their populations is small, so they don't end up with high crime. No, they are tough on crime even if there aren't that many criminals around.
And here is where I will agree with part of your idea. It's obvious that San Francisco elites, and not just San Francisco elites, are weak on crime and order. I remember a video, I think from San Francisco, but maybe it was a city nearby, showing how people were taking the bus without paying the fare, and the people doing this were everyone, including old ethnic Chinese people. This is an example of disorder spreading due to weak enforcement. NYC now has a huge problem with people not paying subway fares, and again it's due to weak enforcement. My contention is merely that the cause of this weak enforcement is ideology.
I appreciate your comment & would encourage a more Straussian reading of my essay in some regards. You are of course right that I don't mind disagreements at all.
That policing can reduce crime is not challenged at all -- in fact it's highly supported by the 2023 Gavin Crackdown discussed at length. Thus the central issue for me is *why* do some areas choose one level of policing, while other areas choose a different level of policing.
Though many often claim our country is a deeply corrupt oligarchy, and there's some merit to those claims, every part of the policing & justice system is subject to democratic control in some way or another. Thus: San Francisco has the level of policing it does *because* it in some sense desires those outcomes. However, we just saw an external factor cause a change in those desires without sparking a revolution -- that was interesting. My read of all this is that there was/is an "unspeakable personal preference" for heavier policing within the city, however most of the population felt they could not act on their personal preference, even if it resulted in personal suffering.
Having a personal preference that you must sublimate to personal detriment is a defining character trait of the modal multi-national Big Tech monopoly employee, particularly those who are selected to work at HQ. Thus this essay is in many ways an attempt to unpack all that.
Your position that the cause of differences in enforcement is "ideology" is fair (fare?) and reasonable, but I find it doesn't go deep enough. If the ideology you hint at was *truly* held, then Gavin Newsom would've been run out of town and the police I photographed would have caused massive marches in the street. It's not like the citizens of SF have not conducted multiple street marches in the last few years. But none of that happened. The opposite, in many ways -- people made noises about living in a police state but were, by and large, quietly supportive of the lowered crime that resulted.
I think all that and more requires a more thorough discussion of the psychology & selection effects that determine the elite in any given city.
I played Eve for a little over 7 years, mostly camping null sec gates. Sometimes solo, sometimes with a small group. Its been years now. I also hunted irl when I was younger and healthy. Eve wasn't the first game where I could be an ambush predator, and it wasn't the last one either. I'm familiar with the experience you mention of the shakes, though its been a long time. With enough exposure and experience the shakes eventually go away, or at least they did for me. Then you can really hunt.
Interesting article.
but once they're gone...is it still fun??
or does the fun morph into a different, other kind of fun? the pursuit of some extrinsic reward? better stats on zkill? eviction bragging rights? better income?
such is life :)
One quibble (I agree with almost everything and the main thrust) the Roman course of honour was about honour not money; it could impoverish the person pursuing - paying for public games etc
Of course!
Here in America we take on hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt for even the STEM degrees. At least those are repaid with earnings, assuming you stay out of academia. The journalism majors, on the other hand....
Still, you're right. Money matters most in America. Fitting, is it not?
This is a fascinating article that I'll be thinking about for a long time. Thanks for writing it. One thing that has been sticking in my head in particular is the idea that Lil' Wayne has TDTPT, otherwise he wouldn't have gained the status that he has in his particular milieu. It's just the tests he has had access to are not the same as the ones that the lawyer and the judge do. I suppose it's more similar to your Venice example.
Ha! Thank you -- and I love when I get a comment that touches on something I ultimately cut out to save space in the essay. You are exactly right. After all:
Lil Wayne ultimately lost the court case in question, which is no surprise. But one has to wonder: how *did* TMZ get ahold of this tape? Who sent it to them? Is there not an intense irony to a dopey lawyer trying to verbally trap Wayne on camera into admitting to "trying to portray a gangster image" and failing -- while simultaneously being verbally abused and threatened on camera? Whose image is bolstered by such a tape leaking? In this way, Wayne loses the court case but cements the loyalty of his fans and ensures many more album sales to come. Wayne and the Lawyer had to ascend VERY different Courses of Honor to get to where they are, but make no mistake, Wayne is a master of his own craft and has had to pass far harder tests than this lawyer in order to make it.
"Sorry sir, no, I'm a superstar."
I'm not sure there's an intense irony, though I get what you're saying. I think it's quite typical of most people from the lawyer strata of society to not think in the way that we are thinking: Lil' Wayne deserves to be recognized as being in the upper eschelons of *his* society, in the same way that Gavin Newsom recognizes that Xi Jinping is in the upper eschelons of Chinese society and deserves respect, regardless of what Newsom might personally feel about how Chinese society is structured or how Jinping uses his power.
Conrad, thanks for sharing your thinking, and for thinking and writing deeply. You noted that your theory leaves some gaps. What do you think of these couple of key attributes of American culture that go unmentioned in your essay? They seem worth mentioning in any culture-based theory of escalation written in 21st century America.
First, many of the top performers in our warrior class loath compliance. For some in the warrior class, violence is about honor and adventure. For others, violence is the ultima ratio in a never-ending monkey dance.
Second, many Americans choose non-violence as a path to their political goals only because they view that path as the singular acceptable path that complies with the dictates of their personal highest authority, God. For the god-fearing, its compliance all the way down, in pursuit of that marshmallow in the sky, the afterlife.
You're welcome & thanks for reading and commenting!
Regarding those two elements you mention: when there are no external limits placed on the conflict, the warrior class that *also* can handle some level of compliance totally wipes the floor with the one that can't. That goes for ancient warfare and modern policing alike. In my view, the existence of certain types who enjoy & indulge in violence qua violence, for its own sake, therefore tends to be contingent on the restraining or excommunicating people who can handle both compliance & violence.
On the second, yes, and you're not the first commenter to mention the Christian element here. Obviously I threw the image of Jesus in the essay rather intentionally -- I think the Christian theology plays a huge role in the evolution of modern attitudes, particularly elite/enlightened attitudes, towards violence. "Blessed are the meek..." etc
Great device of summarising the crucial propositions at the start of the essay. In retrospect, I don't know why it isn't ubiquitous.
I think the issue with the essay in general is this:
1) Modern societies are composed of extremely complex systems of regulated coalitions
2) Participation in those coalitions is the best method for the success of the individual, because it allows the individual to use those coalitions / structures of power to extract benefits for himself or herself (e.g. it is reliably lucrative to gain admission to the rent-extracting associations that are the medical professional bodies)
3) Participation means appearing to comply / signalling compliance with the norms of the group
4) A metanorm shared by almost all of the coalitions that represent society is deference to a codified set of norms, which are legitimised by being notionally accepted by consensus, for resolving disputes - rather than doing it through and hoc force (aka the legal system)
5) Thus, suppression of interpersonal violence and recourse to the dispute-resolution mechanisms of the state is a necessary form of signalling in order to belong to most coalitions (e.g. private equity firms), because it signals compliance with a metaset of norms about interpersonal interaction (and that indicates that you're a predictable and reliable counterparty who can participate in complex and sometimes adversarial social relationships without losing your shit and shooting someone)
6) it is also (generally) a more practical form of enforcement (most private equity guys aren't well equipped to translate their mastery of the universe to mastering a larger, dominant male)
7) thus, the tdtpt kids are unconsciously acting as coalition-forming monkeys. They intuitively understand that modern societies are such complex systems of regulated coalitions that complying with the norms of those coalitions is utility maximising and contradicting the norms of those coalitions is utility destroying. You can in fact make a ton of money and have a good life as a hedge fund dick or a Stanford engineer. You're much less likely to do so as a contrarian, puligistic trucker
So the issue really is the extent to which the tdtpt kid has, at the time of submitting to all of these tests, a model of his/her prospects that is quasi-rational and agentic, even if it isn't explicit.
In the case of a kid who is on the path to become a doctor or a management consultant or a partner at EY, in most cases it's fair to say that they really are just blindly submitting to authority, because they've been taught from a young age to do so and to chase affirmation, irrespective of whether they're happy. Why? Because the trade they're making as they study for 18 hours a day or chuckle a shit-eating affirming laugh for their partner isn't worth the reward - (comfortable material life) - it isn't so great as to justify the psychological strictures.
For the guys who make it a level above that (entrepreneur, hedge fund guy, private equity guy, surgeon), they might still be crushed by perfectionism and need for validation, but they attain a greater level of power and dominance, to the extent that they're sufficiently free that they are consciously motivated by social competition - a very old, atavistic, and transparent abstract game of beating the next guy. Here, it's ambiguous, because they were tdtpt in order to reach a point at which they're close to the social apex - they have the resources to exert their will (via direct power or money) over pretty much everyone else in society. That feels rational.
It's definitely not true for the kids who do it consciously as the rational way to maximise their expected return in a complex, regulated society - tests are shit and I'm utterly bored right now, but Porsche GT3s are super cool, and I can't afford one if I go smoke weed and play games.
Thank you! I started doing it in text form with some of my earlier essays after people complained about them being too long and wanting a summary, then I realized with this one that making graphics in Figma is more fun.
Regarding the rest of your comment: excellent comment and I agree wholeheartedly with how you've put it! Well written too. Ultimately you're exactly right: the PE guys and the Big Tech guys all climbed a pretty similar hierarchy and, at a high enough meta level, aced broadly similar tests.
That said: I don't think I'd be thrown out of any PE conferences, nor any Tech conferences, for suggesting that the average PE suit has a higher Disagreeableness personality score than the average Big Tech worker, and is perhaps *marginally* less subservient to dispute-resolution mechanisms that prioritize consensus building, and would perhaps instead be more willing to engage in direct conflict to resolve disputes (which does not mean violence of course) --- and that all of that makes perfect sense given the marginal differences in what it takes to thrive in a Big Tech vs. PE environment.
Struggling tech companies didn't spend the last 24 months sweating in the office and having nightmares about the phrase "Private Equity" for nothing!
At sufficiently high levels of social status, ugly violence is almost *never* something you want to actually engage in yourself. It is done on your behalf or it is done to you. The question as it relates to Private Equity vs. Big Tech is therefore: if you polled Private Equity workers on their support of heavy handed policing, would they be more or less in favor than Big Tech workers?
I have only a very small personal network in each of those domains myself, but my low-n network does suggest a difference between the two! And that difference breaks in favor of the more conflict-happy group being more amenable to violence done "on their behalf" by the state, and feeling less shame in stating that publicly to an unknown audience.
I'm curious if you'd agree or if you have a different perspective? (You happened to pick two careers here where I have had some experience & do know different people, but I don't have any particular insight into other industries)
(edit: I replied a little before you finished your comment, but yes, I would dearly love a GT3 ;) )
I think the correct model is probably one that stratifies (males) according to their ability to be dominant in coalitions.
As a toy model - if we imagine the psychology of monkeys, the mid-tier monkeys are ones that have to rely on reciprocal bonds and allegiances with others to a greater extent, so their ability to exert control over the world is bounded, their behaviour is subject to greater regulation by the group, and instinctively they limit aggressive behaviour. The converse is true of dominant males (at the margins; the effect sizes might not be that large).
Big-tech workers are no doubt at the far right of the IQ distribution, but someone who's just another product manager or engineer at FAANG is one of the mid-tier monkeys who accepts and participates in the coalition (whether it be the firm or society at large), without seeking to exert dominance over it.
PE is and always has been a more classically masculine, overtly competitive, overtly dominant industry. It isn't that much different from competitive sports as a modern way for males to compete with each other and express dominance, in a socially acceptable way. It is quintessentially concerned with getting the upper hand in a range of relationships with counterparties that are more adversarial than cooperative (e.g. the guys below you who want more of the carry pool, the seller of an asset that you want to buy, the buyer of an asset that you want to sell, etc). PE is about consistently succeeding in situations of direct conflict of interests.
PE selects for dominant males, and ones who succeed in PE are dominant among dominant males, they've spent their lives in situations of conflict, so they have no problem with exerting their will in situations of conflict (even if vicarious). FAANG people are midtier or more cooperative monkeys, so we should expect them to be biased to dispute resolution through established mechanisms, through consensus, through cooperation, etc.
Fell asleep half way through..
My mother once made me do the marshmallow test when I was a kid. Out of pure spite I ate it immediately.
In primary I bought into compliance out of misguided belief that this was virtuous. Seeing how the anarcho-tyranny lite rewarded me (favored degenerates) made me an anti-regime maverick ever since.
A close analogy for what's happened then is Severian from Book of the New Sun. I dream now of nothing but being autarch - a law unto myself.
Such dreams are an entirely reasonable response to perceiving the system to have failed you.
The combination of such dreams with the unshirkable weight of responsibility for others is at the root of all great state formation. The first lord or baron or king or emperor simply does what he must. It is in this same way that Machiavelli described the men who "give laws to the people from nothing" as the greatest of all men, though I didn't touch on it explicitly in my book review of Discourses on Livy.