How Elites Cause Crime By Acing Marshmallow Tests Some people think crime is caused by poverty. Some think crime is caused by criminals. Some even think crime is caused by the climate. Don’t swallow these easy-to-digest popular narratives — society is shaped by its elite, always has been, always will be. It all comes back to the marshmallows.
> "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.
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.
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!
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.
"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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> "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.
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.
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!
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.