Freddie, aren't you a Marxist? Isn't violent revolution something you support? Or do I misunderstand your ideology? And is today's violence based on half-baked ideals any different than the rest of the era of revolutions that has rocked the world from 1789 to 1848 to 1917 to 1968 to 1989 through today? President McKinley would probably say it's par for the course.
Marxists are not necessarily committed to violent revolution by the sake of being Marxists alone. There is a long history of debate over the relevance and necessity of violence as a tactic. Additionally, there is a difference between Marxism: the philosophy, and, Marxism: the ideology.
That being said, I think any Marxist worth their salt would be able to identify how the violence in question here is not politically meaningful nor effective. I wouldn’t say Today’s Violence is comparable in the way you’ve presented it against other historical eras, since the context and conditions are so wildly different between all of them that it’s hard to understand what exactly you mean by invoking them.
The obvious comparison would be the anarchists of the late 1800s/early 1900s. Many were adrift individuals who became suddenly enamored with a new ideology and acted out "propaganda of the deed" by assassinating high-level government officials and/or capitalists. As you say, these actions were not immediately effective but did provoke reaction, which ultimately benefited future revolutionaries especially in Russia.
From what you're saying, inside the left anarchist violence and leninist violence are very different? From the outside the similarities -- people outside the system willing to wreck things and lives with literal physical violence in the hope of something better rising from the ashes -- are more apparent.
Ahh I think I see what you’re comparing now, thanks.
I’m not sure how unprecedented or not those sort of targeted attacks for the sake of shock value were back then, but as for right now, I’d make a rough pass that - there’s been so much social alienation and calcification, combined with enough placation in individual lives (from overall improvements in the general quality of life and other such things over time) to keep people complacent, that extreme acts of individual violence born out of a sense of nihilism don’t move the “revolutionary” needle much. And I don’t mean necessarily violent revolution, but revolution in the sense of generating legitimate political change of any sort by any means.
Yea, I’d say anarchist and Leninist violence tend to be a bit different from each other. Historically these groups haven’t liked each other very much. Personally I don’t care much for anarchism at all, and I wouldn’t call myself Leninist by any stretch. When people outside the understanding of an ideology simply see violent attempts at political overthrow for indiscernible means that they fear may also target and impact them, yea I could imagine it’d feel less like a difference that matters haha.
Nothing illustrates horseshoe theory in 2025 to me more clearly than about-to-be-a-father Freddie deBoer turning into something that almost reads like the anti-internet Christian milieu on Substack (Jon Haidt at After Babel; Freya India; Paul Kingsnorth at Abbey of Misrule)
Honestly the communist/Mutual Aid/anticapitalist far left in general these days almost reads like a Benedict Option-era Dreher before he moved to Hungary and went totally nuts.
Haven't heard Dreher's name in a while. What a blast from the past - I used to follow his blog at TAC pretty regularly for several years, and was active on the subreddit for him during the divorce trainwreck. Dropped out of keeping up with him after TAC fired him for being too crazy even for them (!).
This piece reminds me of Dreher. I read him most days of the week, he addresses trends that are not well covered elsewhere. I think people who aren't Christian will have some difficulty over some of his stuff.
He went nuts (as OP said) and started becoming progressively more erratic and bizarre in his writing / tweets until TAC fired him. Just loony bin stuff, talking about seeing Jesus appear to him at the bottom of the Danube, saying that he's worked hard to "achieve" heterosexuality (it was long suspected he's a closeted self-hating bi / gay guy), claiming that demons were knocking over chairs in his hotel room, etc.
Really interesting post and prompt for self-reflection for me personally since I like reading all three of those writers, despite thinking that Kingsnorth is a bit of a Douglas Pearce sort.
Man, I miss BenOp Dreher. That’s when I started reading him. It’s really a shame. It feels like his last sane moment was his post fisking that MyPillow rally after 1/6. Now if another January 6 happened he’d be there with a battering ram, I think.
Yea, from what I’ve come to understand that era laid quite a bit of groundwork for what we’re experiencing in left-strained politics now. And I’m not much a fan of some of what I’ve read up on from then, as far as broad political tendencies and tactics go or how they’ve impacted the ideologies of now. A good bit of New Left Academia kinda screwed the pooch with the direction they took, but there’s some interesting philosophy to be found here and there through those decades imo.
Absolutely. That’s why I’ve been talking so much about the New Right replacing what’s left of our tottering institutions with The Void. Pure nothingness but being cogs in the technocapitalist machine.
Not that meaningless is exclusive, or even original to, the right. But boy oh boy now that the right has capitulated, we are in for it now.
Paul Kingsnorth at his substack “the Abbey of Misrule” has written the most compellingly about this in my opinion. (His term is even The Void which makes me suspect you’ve read him.)
(Of course, it’s from a born-again Christian perspective, and he concludes that there is no solution without returning to monotheism, of which Orthodox Christianity is the best. But even if I don’t like his suggested cure, he writes well about the disease diagnosis!)
Rod Dreher pointed me to him and I read a couple of pieces (including the one you posted, if memory serves), but as a thoroughgoing atheist I couldn’t quite connect. I wasn’t directly quoting from him, but it’s entirely likely that his wording got stuck in my subconscious. Thanks for the reminder! Maybe I’ll go back and refresh myself.
I love Kingsnorth as a prose stylist and find him incredibly compelling... sort of a cross between Douglas Pearce and William Blake. Right about almost all the symptoms, his idea of a cure is probably terrifying.
This is a brilliant series and I return to it often. I don't have anything brilliant to say, but isn't the diagnosis pretty indisputable even if the offered cures differ? I'm just like, ok, so what do we do?
Maybe I will reread it. My answer has been to work on building small communities within larger ones in order to recreate the real connections the last hundred years have taken from us. (I see in Geoff’s profile that he’s an urbanist—I wonder if it’s from the same urge?) I’m not very good at it, as a complete introvert, but I’m trying.
What we had before was a sort of unspoken social contract in the West. Work moderately hard, play by the rules that matter, and you will lead a reasonably comfortable life, especially if you are white or Asian. Not only that, but your children will have a decent shot at living a better life than you had.
That bargain is increasingly breaking down. The only thing you will get from hard work and playing by the rules is old.
As a result of the breakdown of this bargain, seeing the grifters prosper while honest strivers are abused, we will see humans flail around in all sorts of wild directions, lashing out and looking for answers.
2. What exactly is the deal with Effective Altruists? SBF and Crew and now this?
Because of the connections between EAs and the overly number-friendly rationalists, EAs are attached to a kind of utilitarianism that is incredibly easily misused. Like, it’s actually the disproof of utilitarianism. As someone who is rationalist-adjacent but can’t get on board with the crazy parts, I have a reasonably good sense of how all that works.
I forget who it was that said that you cannot imagine a more perfect hell than if you gave every expert unfettered authority over things pertaining to his expertise.
I have a loose, friend-of-an-acquaintance, connection to the Zizians. And I'm familiar with the philosophical currents in which they swim. I think you're wrong to discount the particular details of their beliefs. Because they are specific people, with specific problems.
First and foremost, I see them as an object lesson in the dangers of taking ideas too seriously.
Human morality is generally pretty vague, pretty fuzzy, prone to weird implications and minor contradictions. This is a good thing. Because we aren't really up to the task of designing a perfect morality. Nor are we capable of perfect adherence to any morality. If you try to create and execute moral perfection, you'll go mad - and I'm pretty sure that at the core of what happened to the Zizians.
“There’s this whole literature and decision theory about this kind of thing. So there’s some amount of legitness behind this,” Taylor said of timeless decision theory. “But they take it in all these weird directions where they’re talking about, like, ‘Oh, maybe if I make this decision, I will, like, burn the entire timeline.’ And so it gets really weird.”
It's an extreme, yet completely natural, outgrowth of utilitarianism. That's exactly why I stopped being a utilitarian. As a moral philosophy it's completely untenable for real human beings, and I think it's psychologically broken a whole lot of well-meaning people with a penchant for consistency.
I can't help but wonder if any philosophy (or religion) can be twisted around by insane people. At that point the question is whether or not there is something in the wider culture or society that is stressing people out/encouraging them to engage in insane behavior.
I mean, is it any coincidence that crime in the US has shot up since the pandemic, along with traffic deaths, homelessness, overdoses, etc.?
It might be arguable that religion ultimately organizes to provide an outlet for transcendental thought and emotion while at the same time providing guard rails which keep it from veering into insane behavior which becomes destructive to the community.
Of course this ultimately creates other problems, but these were not really knowable in ancient societies and the need to reign in madness-inspired transcendental thinking was too compelling.
I think utilitarianism has a higher chance than average kill count, especially when you consider that Marxism / Maoism are basically utilitarian (I would argue).
Did the Chinese/Mao explicitly identify as utilitarian? The Zizians are definitely rationalists--they use the lingo, debate the philosophy, protest rationalist meetings, etc.
I don’t think they did identify as utilitarian, no. I’m suggesting that they WERE utilitarian in the sense that it was consequentialist (outcomes matters, not intent) and good was defined as what benefited the most people.
You’re right that the Zizians are much more explicitly using utilitarian ideas than Maoists.
The most radical people tend to be the most philosophically consistent. Think about your average Muslim versus a member of ISIS—who follows the Koran more closely?
I'd like to put on the table that religion isn't a part of a solution and lack of it isn't a problem. If I've learned anything in the decade, its that ideology gets in the way of loving people. Ideology, which includes religion, superficially feels like being a part of something larger than one's self, but if you can dial into a religion or an idea without talking to another human soul and judging everyone you meet, then you've not connected to anyone.
We aim to connect with people, and our aspirational ideas get in the way; religion has done that as well as modern ideas like DEI and anti-racism. Secularism hold promise in that we could look in the mirror and actually choose to believe in each other - which is all we've every really had any way.
A bit brief given the weightiness of the topic. There does seem to be some core emptiness in the current culture, a longing that nothing can fill. Social Media does very much feel like our undoing in so many ways.
These regrettable seasons have come before and I think you will be pleasantly surprised to see this one driven back again. The ugliness of it galvanized the counter response. God will that it were otherwise, but this is the world we live in. Good things will come again and we don’t have to be passive making that happen.
There is a real, personal, developmental benefit in pairing off and working a job and creating a home and raising a child.
That allows us to care about something more than ourselves which is the key step in transitioning to adulthood.
Look around the world where those benchmarks are not attainable... how are those societies functioning?
EDIT: This is not the only path, obviously. But every content adult that I know cares about something more than themselves, and that creates hope and connection and meaning.
In the aftermath of the antifa riots a few years ago there were many commenters who speculated that the inability of overeducated and underemployed young people to pair up and have kids was leading to the rise of large numbers of unattached and socially isolated individuals.
Somebody with a wife and kid has skin in the game. They have something to lose. What about those that don't?
If you take a trip to rural white america, you'll find that this is not a lefty thing. Many of my peers, all full-on MAGA supporters, have adopted the opioids, multiple kids with multiple partners, dependent on parents model of adulthood. For both left and right, the economics have driven a lot of this despondency, although the resultant trappings look quite different.
Yeah, that's Vance's Hillbilly Elegy angle, isn't it? Dysfunctional family units and rampant drug abuse/addiction.
I have to wonder if the whole "Go to college and get a decent job" thing doesn't go hand in hand with the deindustrialization brought on by offshoring. Surely it's no coincidence that that the drive to push more and more people into college came about as elites decided that blue collar manufacturing jobs weren't worth preserving. Now we have too many college grads fighting over not enough white collar jobs and a bunch of underemployed blue collar workers left behind when factory work moved overseas.
I haven't read the book but the difference in my hometown from the 1970s and 80s, with a booming paper mill, to now is stark. The amount of meaning and community those union jobs provided impacted every aspect of the town. It is fascinating to see the workers who would wear their union jackets, and vote 100% democratic ticket, to now, with the MAGA gear. In both cases, those cultural symbols provided a sense of belonging and camaraderie. It was far from perfect, and there were real downsides to that time and place, but the change in the community is impossible to ignore.
"Hillbilly Elegy" is very and quickly readable and I believe sincere in its description of a culture that the literati heretofore only enjoyed when delivered, fiction or memoir, in feminist or antiracist or "up from *****" guise designed to flatter the usual suspects; it's amazing at this juncture when so few people read, that it should have propelled him into politics. But the better book is the somewhat less personal (or at least viewed at greater distance) "Glass House".
I can't comment on others, but I can say for myself that my existence as a wife and mother is a complete transformation (for the better) from my pinballing, free-wheeling, angst-ridden self. I always had many friends, always had a lot of fun, but I felt adrift, unmoored, desperate for purpose. I can absolutely imagine that if I'd never met my husband, I would have remained so - like a global nomad, justifying her existence in some way that I knew (in my heart) wasn't true for me, but was necessary to not be embarrassed and disappointed in myself and my life. Perhaps that's conditioning, but I don't think so. Being married and being a mom has helped to shave off/refine the rough parts of myself and allowed me deeper contact with that which is true of/for me and feels more true in general. But the thing is, too: I always had skin in the game. We all do.
The Zizians and Luigi Magione (as well as a lot of the Rationalist sphere including SBF/FTX) have a penchant for alternative coliving arrangements, remote knowledge work, and psychedelics. I don't know if there's a better recipe for detaching yourself from the normal ties and structures that bind us to our families and the village around us.
Seems an easy thing to say, but is it not abundantly clear that violence and detachment and hatred breeds just as easily in marriages and families? We've got a far longer period of time as our sample there, but even if we just looked at now it's still true.
The problems of loneliness and lack of community may intersect with the increasing numbers of people who are single or don't have kids, but they are also much wider than that.
The parallels are astonishing. Caroline Ellison's journal entries where she writes about the drugs she's taking and her attempts to optimize her life with pharmaceuticals and tech are strikingly similar. I'm going to guess it's probably widespread in young techie culture right now.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of the differences between the post-1990s postmodernism-driven left and the previous generation of materialist leftists (of which our host here counts himself I think)
Did previous generations of leftists have such an anything-goes life-is-pointless-so-make-your-own-meaning nihilism at the core of it?
Definitely after world war 1 it did. Almost every excess of 2012-2022 peak po-mo libertinism was there in the 1920s in Europe after the trenches. (At least after that hell it was maybe more justifiable — what’s our equivalent? Social media and internet hyperconnectivity I guess? Which says something…)
Was there ever a time when leading far-left thinkers assumed a norm that having a family and a stable life was a Good Thing?
Having grown up with post-Vietnam hippie parents on the edge of a commune... there were different subsets, some pushing for creating a whole new communal paradigm and others reconnecting with eternal values. Fortunately my family was in the back-to-the-land subset of that movement, which provided an overabundance of materialist reality, shoveling manure and such.
> (At least after that hell it was maybe more justifiable — what’s our equivalent? Social media and internet hyperconnectivity I guess? Which says something…)
I often wonder if there's a more insidious cultural influence resulting from the large combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan than anyone has considered. You hear bits and pieces of it in terms of drug addiction among veterans driven by PTSD. But by and large those long periods of combat deployment seem to be less discussed in terms of long-term effects than was common among Vietnam veterans in the 1970s and 80s.
Given the reach of social media, it seems at least probable that any given veteran traumatized into nihilism is potentially more influential than any given Vietnam veteran dependent on personal contact. Maybe add in the ability for social media users to have access to the people and experiences on the "other side" of these conflicts, as well, would certainly seem to accelerate adoption of nihilism.
A lot of people are having social media "insights" about the results of Joe combing back from an Iraq deployment (PTSD, other horrors), the Potemkin Village-level political assessment of "victory" plus the remnants of the Middle Eastern family bombed into homelessness in their own TikTok video. I guess I wonder how nihilistic thinking and existential horror isn't the response.
The Free Press has an interview with an FBI agent who had to retire with PTSD after investigating a Satanic neo-Nazi organization that tries to brainwash the vulnerable into harming or killing themselves. The group is called 764 and is apparently a splinter cell of the Order of Nine Angles, an "an esoteric militant accelerationist movement".
One, quite the coincidence and two, what weird times.
I feel bad for the fellow, but at the same time I can't help but feel that the most compelling part of the article was the insane cult that only gets mentioned in passing.
You can probably add Luigi Mangione (UnitedHealthcare CEO) and Bryan Kohberger (Accused Idaho College Killer) to the list as well. Nihilism is the devil’s playground.
The funny thing is, we can wish away and deny these lurking tendencies all we want, but there’s a reason for the endless violence in movies. Sure, it's made palatable by the “good guys” taking out the “bad guys” in comically romanticized action sequence, but there’s no denying that a large percentage of us (myself included) find it entertaining. I think the movies are a mostly harmless outlet, but the fact that it's entertaining on some primal level is a little disturbing.
The fascination many have with simulation theory is also a symptom of this slow descent into nihilism, I think. If the world is not real, then the consequences of our actions matter not, and any horrors produced are but a game to the simulations true believers.
I think the chaos is here, or was here. I think it grew worse with the slippery, anything goes, ideology of today and lies about it from govt. Strangely enough, I think Trump is defining boundaries again, boundaries that most people believe in but were totally suppressed for the last ten years. Now there are real sides that you can examine and choose to support or not. We are not lost in space anymore.
What precisely is blank and pathetic about the trump shooter's face? I am not saying I disagree, but I am saying it's alarming that some extremely normal looking kid is blank and pathetic in our culture. We are obviously projecting information onto the kid---but what is it?
This sort of analysis used to be niche and confined to people who read The Last Psychiatrist, but I guess its unavoidable now in the face of the evidence.
Nothing illustrates society in 2025 to me more clearly than an elegantly constructed observation that OP is human and behaves like a human, look how clever I am
Freddie, aren't you a Marxist? Isn't violent revolution something you support? Or do I misunderstand your ideology? And is today's violence based on half-baked ideals any different than the rest of the era of revolutions that has rocked the world from 1789 to 1848 to 1917 to 1968 to 1989 through today? President McKinley would probably say it's par for the course.
Marxists are not necessarily committed to violent revolution by the sake of being Marxists alone. There is a long history of debate over the relevance and necessity of violence as a tactic. Additionally, there is a difference between Marxism: the philosophy, and, Marxism: the ideology.
That being said, I think any Marxist worth their salt would be able to identify how the violence in question here is not politically meaningful nor effective. I wouldn’t say Today’s Violence is comparable in the way you’ve presented it against other historical eras, since the context and conditions are so wildly different between all of them that it’s hard to understand what exactly you mean by invoking them.
The obvious comparison would be the anarchists of the late 1800s/early 1900s. Many were adrift individuals who became suddenly enamored with a new ideology and acted out "propaganda of the deed" by assassinating high-level government officials and/or capitalists. As you say, these actions were not immediately effective but did provoke reaction, which ultimately benefited future revolutionaries especially in Russia.
From what you're saying, inside the left anarchist violence and leninist violence are very different? From the outside the similarities -- people outside the system willing to wreck things and lives with literal physical violence in the hope of something better rising from the ashes -- are more apparent.
Ahh I think I see what you’re comparing now, thanks.
I’m not sure how unprecedented or not those sort of targeted attacks for the sake of shock value were back then, but as for right now, I’d make a rough pass that - there’s been so much social alienation and calcification, combined with enough placation in individual lives (from overall improvements in the general quality of life and other such things over time) to keep people complacent, that extreme acts of individual violence born out of a sense of nihilism don’t move the “revolutionary” needle much. And I don’t mean necessarily violent revolution, but revolution in the sense of generating legitimate political change of any sort by any means.
Yea, I’d say anarchist and Leninist violence tend to be a bit different from each other. Historically these groups haven’t liked each other very much. Personally I don’t care much for anarchism at all, and I wouldn’t call myself Leninist by any stretch. When people outside the understanding of an ideology simply see violent attempts at political overthrow for indiscernible means that they fear may also target and impact them, yea I could imagine it’d feel less like a difference that matters haha.
Nothing illustrates horseshoe theory in 2025 to me more clearly than about-to-be-a-father Freddie deBoer turning into something that almost reads like the anti-internet Christian milieu on Substack (Jon Haidt at After Babel; Freya India; Paul Kingsnorth at Abbey of Misrule)
Honestly the communist/Mutual Aid/anticapitalist far left in general these days almost reads like a Benedict Option-era Dreher before he moved to Hungary and went totally nuts.
Haven't heard Dreher's name in a while. What a blast from the past - I used to follow his blog at TAC pretty regularly for several years, and was active on the subreddit for him during the divorce trainwreck. Dropped out of keeping up with him after TAC fired him for being too crazy even for them (!).
This piece reminds me of Dreher. I read him most days of the week, he addresses trends that are not well covered elsewhere. I think people who aren't Christian will have some difficulty over some of his stuff.
Wow he got divorced? What was the trainwreck, did people get mad?
He went nuts (as OP said) and started becoming progressively more erratic and bizarre in his writing / tweets until TAC fired him. Just loony bin stuff, talking about seeing Jesus appear to him at the bottom of the Danube, saying that he's worked hard to "achieve" heterosexuality (it was long suspected he's a closeted self-hating bi / gay guy), claiming that demons were knocking over chairs in his hotel room, etc.
Got a link?
Really interesting post and prompt for self-reflection for me personally since I like reading all three of those writers, despite thinking that Kingsnorth is a bit of a Douglas Pearce sort.
Man, I miss BenOp Dreher. That’s when I started reading him. It’s really a shame. It feels like his last sane moment was his post fisking that MyPillow rally after 1/6. Now if another January 6 happened he’d be there with a battering ram, I think.
This feels very 1968 to me, which was also very bad.
Yea, from what I’ve come to understand that era laid quite a bit of groundwork for what we’re experiencing in left-strained politics now. And I’m not much a fan of some of what I’ve read up on from then, as far as broad political tendencies and tactics go or how they’ve impacted the ideologies of now. A good bit of New Left Academia kinda screwed the pooch with the direction they took, but there’s some interesting philosophy to be found here and there through those decades imo.
Absolutely. That’s why I’ve been talking so much about the New Right replacing what’s left of our tottering institutions with The Void. Pure nothingness but being cogs in the technocapitalist machine.
Not that meaningless is exclusive, or even original to, the right. But boy oh boy now that the right has capitulated, we are in for it now.
Paul Kingsnorth at his substack “the Abbey of Misrule” has written the most compellingly about this in my opinion. (His term is even The Void which makes me suspect you’ve read him.)
Eg
https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/the-tale-of-the-machine
⬆️ is a good overview
(Of course, it’s from a born-again Christian perspective, and he concludes that there is no solution without returning to monotheism, of which Orthodox Christianity is the best. But even if I don’t like his suggested cure, he writes well about the disease diagnosis!)
Rod Dreher pointed me to him and I read a couple of pieces (including the one you posted, if memory serves), but as a thoroughgoing atheist I couldn’t quite connect. I wasn’t directly quoting from him, but it’s entirely likely that his wording got stuck in my subconscious. Thanks for the reminder! Maybe I’ll go back and refresh myself.
I love Kingsnorth as a prose stylist and find him incredibly compelling... sort of a cross between Douglas Pearce and William Blake. Right about almost all the symptoms, his idea of a cure is probably terrifying.
This is a brilliant series and I return to it often. I don't have anything brilliant to say, but isn't the diagnosis pretty indisputable even if the offered cures differ? I'm just like, ok, so what do we do?
Maybe I will reread it. My answer has been to work on building small communities within larger ones in order to recreate the real connections the last hundred years have taken from us. (I see in Geoff’s profile that he’s an urbanist—I wonder if it’s from the same urge?) I’m not very good at it, as a complete introvert, but I’m trying.
1. Start liking it.
What we had before was a sort of unspoken social contract in the West. Work moderately hard, play by the rules that matter, and you will lead a reasonably comfortable life, especially if you are white or Asian. Not only that, but your children will have a decent shot at living a better life than you had.
That bargain is increasingly breaking down. The only thing you will get from hard work and playing by the rules is old.
As a result of the breakdown of this bargain, seeing the grifters prosper while honest strivers are abused, we will see humans flail around in all sorts of wild directions, lashing out and looking for answers.
2. What exactly is the deal with Effective Altruists? SBF and Crew and now this?
Because of the connections between EAs and the overly number-friendly rationalists, EAs are attached to a kind of utilitarianism that is incredibly easily misused. Like, it’s actually the disproof of utilitarianism. As someone who is rationalist-adjacent but can’t get on board with the crazy parts, I have a reasonably good sense of how all that works.
I forget who it was that said that you cannot imagine a more perfect hell than if you gave every expert unfettered authority over things pertaining to his expertise.
I have a loose, friend-of-an-acquaintance, connection to the Zizians. And I'm familiar with the philosophical currents in which they swim. I think you're wrong to discount the particular details of their beliefs. Because they are specific people, with specific problems.
First and foremost, I see them as an object lesson in the dangers of taking ideas too seriously.
Human morality is generally pretty vague, pretty fuzzy, prone to weird implications and minor contradictions. This is a good thing. Because we aren't really up to the task of designing a perfect morality. Nor are we capable of perfect adherence to any morality. If you try to create and execute moral perfection, you'll go mad - and I'm pretty sure that at the core of what happened to the Zizians.
“There’s this whole literature and decision theory about this kind of thing. So there’s some amount of legitness behind this,” Taylor said of timeless decision theory. “But they take it in all these weird directions where they’re talking about, like, ‘Oh, maybe if I make this decision, I will, like, burn the entire timeline.’ And so it gets really weird.”
https://openvallejo.org/2025/01/27/suspects-in-killings-of-vallejo-witness-vermont-border-patrol-agent-connected-by-marriage-license-extreme-ideology/
It's an extreme, yet completely natural, outgrowth of utilitarianism. That's exactly why I stopped being a utilitarian. As a moral philosophy it's completely untenable for real human beings, and I think it's psychologically broken a whole lot of well-meaning people with a penchant for consistency.
I can't help but wonder if any philosophy (or religion) can be twisted around by insane people. At that point the question is whether or not there is something in the wider culture or society that is stressing people out/encouraging them to engage in insane behavior.
I mean, is it any coincidence that crime in the US has shot up since the pandemic, along with traffic deaths, homelessness, overdoses, etc.?
It might be arguable that religion ultimately organizes to provide an outlet for transcendental thought and emotion while at the same time providing guard rails which keep it from veering into insane behavior which becomes destructive to the community.
Of course this ultimately creates other problems, but these were not really knowable in ancient societies and the need to reign in madness-inspired transcendental thinking was too compelling.
I think utilitarianism has a higher chance than average kill count, especially when you consider that Marxism / Maoism are basically utilitarian (I would argue).
Did the Chinese/Mao explicitly identify as utilitarian? The Zizians are definitely rationalists--they use the lingo, debate the philosophy, protest rationalist meetings, etc.
I don’t think they did identify as utilitarian, no. I’m suggesting that they WERE utilitarian in the sense that it was consequentialist (outcomes matters, not intent) and good was defined as what benefited the most people.
You’re right that the Zizians are much more explicitly using utilitarian ideas than Maoists.
The most radical people tend to be the most philosophically consistent. Think about your average Muslim versus a member of ISIS—who follows the Koran more closely?
I suspect moderate Muslims are highly correlated with living in a developed economy.
I'd like to put on the table that religion isn't a part of a solution and lack of it isn't a problem. If I've learned anything in the decade, its that ideology gets in the way of loving people. Ideology, which includes religion, superficially feels like being a part of something larger than one's self, but if you can dial into a religion or an idea without talking to another human soul and judging everyone you meet, then you've not connected to anyone.
We aim to connect with people, and our aspirational ideas get in the way; religion has done that as well as modern ideas like DEI and anti-racism. Secularism hold promise in that we could look in the mirror and actually choose to believe in each other - which is all we've every really had any way.
"Nor are we capable of perfect adherence to any morality."
We can't even write a perfect one-size-fits-all law code, much less a moral code.
A bit brief given the weightiness of the topic. There does seem to be some core emptiness in the current culture, a longing that nothing can fill. Social Media does very much feel like our undoing in so many ways.
These regrettable seasons have come before and I think you will be pleasantly surprised to see this one driven back again. The ugliness of it galvanized the counter response. God will that it were otherwise, but this is the world we live in. Good things will come again and we don’t have to be passive making that happen.
There is a real, personal, developmental benefit in pairing off and working a job and creating a home and raising a child.
That allows us to care about something more than ourselves which is the key step in transitioning to adulthood.
Look around the world where those benchmarks are not attainable... how are those societies functioning?
EDIT: This is not the only path, obviously. But every content adult that I know cares about something more than themselves, and that creates hope and connection and meaning.
In the aftermath of the antifa riots a few years ago there were many commenters who speculated that the inability of overeducated and underemployed young people to pair up and have kids was leading to the rise of large numbers of unattached and socially isolated individuals.
Somebody with a wife and kid has skin in the game. They have something to lose. What about those that don't?
If you take a trip to rural white america, you'll find that this is not a lefty thing. Many of my peers, all full-on MAGA supporters, have adopted the opioids, multiple kids with multiple partners, dependent on parents model of adulthood. For both left and right, the economics have driven a lot of this despondency, although the resultant trappings look quite different.
Yeah, that's Vance's Hillbilly Elegy angle, isn't it? Dysfunctional family units and rampant drug abuse/addiction.
I have to wonder if the whole "Go to college and get a decent job" thing doesn't go hand in hand with the deindustrialization brought on by offshoring. Surely it's no coincidence that that the drive to push more and more people into college came about as elites decided that blue collar manufacturing jobs weren't worth preserving. Now we have too many college grads fighting over not enough white collar jobs and a bunch of underemployed blue collar workers left behind when factory work moved overseas.
🎯
I haven't read the book but the difference in my hometown from the 1970s and 80s, with a booming paper mill, to now is stark. The amount of meaning and community those union jobs provided impacted every aspect of the town. It is fascinating to see the workers who would wear their union jackets, and vote 100% democratic ticket, to now, with the MAGA gear. In both cases, those cultural symbols provided a sense of belonging and camaraderie. It was far from perfect, and there were real downsides to that time and place, but the change in the community is impossible to ignore.
I have always maintained that what led to Trump's rise was not his Twitter account but NAFTA and most favored trade status for China.
it has to be in the equation for sure
+smartphones
Have you read Demon Copperfield?
No, I haven't gotten around to it yet. In my personal circle of friends some really liked it and others were more negative.
I thought it was wonderful. And I really need to start remembering to call it by its real name! Demon Copperhead!
"Hillbilly Elegy" is very and quickly readable and I believe sincere in its description of a culture that the literati heretofore only enjoyed when delivered, fiction or memoir, in feminist or antiracist or "up from *****" guise designed to flatter the usual suspects; it's amazing at this juncture when so few people read, that it should have propelled him into politics. But the better book is the somewhat less personal (or at least viewed at greater distance) "Glass House".
I can't comment on others, but I can say for myself that my existence as a wife and mother is a complete transformation (for the better) from my pinballing, free-wheeling, angst-ridden self. I always had many friends, always had a lot of fun, but I felt adrift, unmoored, desperate for purpose. I can absolutely imagine that if I'd never met my husband, I would have remained so - like a global nomad, justifying her existence in some way that I knew (in my heart) wasn't true for me, but was necessary to not be embarrassed and disappointed in myself and my life. Perhaps that's conditioning, but I don't think so. Being married and being a mom has helped to shave off/refine the rough parts of myself and allowed me deeper contact with that which is true of/for me and feels more true in general. But the thing is, too: I always had skin in the game. We all do.
The Zizians and Luigi Magione (as well as a lot of the Rationalist sphere including SBF/FTX) have a penchant for alternative coliving arrangements, remote knowledge work, and psychedelics. I don't know if there's a better recipe for detaching yourself from the normal ties and structures that bind us to our families and the village around us.
Seems an easy thing to say, but is it not abundantly clear that violence and detachment and hatred breeds just as easily in marriages and families? We've got a far longer period of time as our sample there, but even if we just looked at now it's still true.
The problems of loneliness and lack of community may intersect with the increasing numbers of people who are single or don't have kids, but they are also much wider than that.
"coliving arrangements, remote knowledge work, and psychedelics"
Isn't that pretty much exactly what was happening with Sam Bankman Fried?
WorriedButch did mention SBF
The parallels are astonishing. Caroline Ellison's journal entries where she writes about the drugs she's taking and her attempts to optimize her life with pharmaceuticals and tech are strikingly similar. I'm going to guess it's probably widespread in young techie culture right now.
her journal entries where? in the book or elsewhere? I didn't know about that (or remember - I did read the Michael Lewis book)
My bad, it was her public social media posts (on Twitter) that were widely reported on in the media.
village is a word/experience that needs to come back
I ws thinking about the FTX Crew.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of the differences between the post-1990s postmodernism-driven left and the previous generation of materialist leftists (of which our host here counts himself I think)
Did previous generations of leftists have such an anything-goes life-is-pointless-so-make-your-own-meaning nihilism at the core of it?
Definitely after world war 1 it did. Almost every excess of 2012-2022 peak po-mo libertinism was there in the 1920s in Europe after the trenches. (At least after that hell it was maybe more justifiable — what’s our equivalent? Social media and internet hyperconnectivity I guess? Which says something…)
Was there ever a time when leading far-left thinkers assumed a norm that having a family and a stable life was a Good Thing?
Having grown up with post-Vietnam hippie parents on the edge of a commune... there were different subsets, some pushing for creating a whole new communal paradigm and others reconnecting with eternal values. Fortunately my family was in the back-to-the-land subset of that movement, which provided an overabundance of materialist reality, shoveling manure and such.
> (At least after that hell it was maybe more justifiable — what’s our equivalent? Social media and internet hyperconnectivity I guess? Which says something…)
I often wonder if there's a more insidious cultural influence resulting from the large combat deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan than anyone has considered. You hear bits and pieces of it in terms of drug addiction among veterans driven by PTSD. But by and large those long periods of combat deployment seem to be less discussed in terms of long-term effects than was common among Vietnam veterans in the 1970s and 80s.
Given the reach of social media, it seems at least probable that any given veteran traumatized into nihilism is potentially more influential than any given Vietnam veteran dependent on personal contact. Maybe add in the ability for social media users to have access to the people and experiences on the "other side" of these conflicts, as well, would certainly seem to accelerate adoption of nihilism.
A lot of people are having social media "insights" about the results of Joe combing back from an Iraq deployment (PTSD, other horrors), the Potemkin Village-level political assessment of "victory" plus the remnants of the Middle Eastern family bombed into homelessness in their own TikTok video. I guess I wonder how nihilistic thinking and existential horror isn't the response.
I basically came here to say the same. Since my son was born I just CARE so much. And want to be even more connected to the world around me.
The Free Press has an interview with an FBI agent who had to retire with PTSD after investigating a Satanic neo-Nazi organization that tries to brainwash the vulnerable into harming or killing themselves. The group is called 764 and is apparently a splinter cell of the Order of Nine Angles, an "an esoteric militant accelerationist movement".
One, quite the coincidence and two, what weird times.
Link to the FP article, which is mostly preoccupied with the lack of mental health counseling available to FBI agents.
https://www.thefp.com/p/fbi-veteran-pat-mcmonigle-ptsd-kash-patel
I feel bad for the fellow, but at the same time I can't help but feel that the most compelling part of the article was the insane cult that only gets mentioned in passing.
https://gnet-research.org/2024/01/19/764-the-intersection-of-terrorism-violent-extremism-and-child-sexual-exploitation/
https://gnet-research.org/2023/08/03/cultic-religious-groups-order-of-nine-angles/
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Thank you for this. I'd heard it before, but it's been a really long time and I had to look it up.
You should try to get this published.
You can probably add Luigi Mangione (UnitedHealthcare CEO) and Bryan Kohberger (Accused Idaho College Killer) to the list as well. Nihilism is the devil’s playground.
The funny thing is, we can wish away and deny these lurking tendencies all we want, but there’s a reason for the endless violence in movies. Sure, it's made palatable by the “good guys” taking out the “bad guys” in comically romanticized action sequence, but there’s no denying that a large percentage of us (myself included) find it entertaining. I think the movies are a mostly harmless outlet, but the fact that it's entertaining on some primal level is a little disturbing.
Basically the classic Joan Didion essay https://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2017/06/didion/
Violence alone is not inherently bad. It's how it's used that matters.
But I get what you're saying, it does kinda feel like a tipping point somehow.
The fascination many have with simulation theory is also a symptom of this slow descent into nihilism, I think. If the world is not real, then the consequences of our actions matter not, and any horrors produced are but a game to the simulations true believers.
I think the chaos is here, or was here. I think it grew worse with the slippery, anything goes, ideology of today and lies about it from govt. Strangely enough, I think Trump is defining boundaries again, boundaries that most people believe in but were totally suppressed for the last ten years. Now there are real sides that you can examine and choose to support or not. We are not lost in space anymore.
What precisely is blank and pathetic about the trump shooter's face? I am not saying I disagree, but I am saying it's alarming that some extremely normal looking kid is blank and pathetic in our culture. We are obviously projecting information onto the kid---but what is it?
This sort of analysis used to be niche and confined to people who read The Last Psychiatrist, but I guess its unavoidable now in the face of the evidence.
Nothing illustrates society in 2025 to me more clearly than an elegantly constructed observation that OP is human and behaves like a human, look how clever I am