One of the things that really distresses me when TikTok goes off on geopolitics is how grossly under-read so many TikTokkers really are. A lot of these folks were little children when 9/11 happened, and have since informed themselves almost purely through social media. As much as they decry "corporate media," they are themselves ardent consumers of media that is even more slanted, more slipshod, and more irresponsible than what they rely upon. How seriously are we to take such hot takes, really?
I definitely worry about the literacy of generations who grew up with screens. In fact, there was an entire ending portion of this essay about how literature is the remedy to this. Personally, I don't normally spend time writing about "hot takes" on TikTok (I would eventually go insane), precisely because I don't take a lot of them seriously. But this one seemed directly related to an issue I've been thinking about for years.
The whole idea of formal literacy, in being able to write well and develop reading comprehension skills at a very high level, seems to have always been relegated to a small percentage of the population that had been blessed by nature/God/luck etc. One of the problems this approach had was the disadvantage of being a highly paternalistic approach, in that the elites through print media, radio, and TV set the terms of what respectable people beneath them should believe. But now the gatekeepers are gone, experts are scorned, and individuals increasingly believe they don't need moral or intellectual guidance. Individualism means they can figure it out on their own. Increasingly, I think that's been proven wrong. If people believe Hamas is justified in killing innocent Israeli children and babies, who have no reasonable culpability in the genesis of the conflict, or weren't even born when the Palestinian displacement/Nakba happened, or Bin Laden was justified in killing almost 3,000 people in NYC to wage Islamic jihad, then they're lost morally. There's two articles, one in the Atlantic by David Brooks, and another in the Atlantic about the Founders that influenced how I feel about this. I highly recommend both of them.
I think the danger there is the belief that either method, top down definition of the good or figuring out for yourself, can reliably get you to understanding the good. Because as Quintilian put it "Everyone prefers to have learned, rather than to learn." That is, they want the answer and to be done with it, instead of going slowly and figuring things out with the knowledge that they won't have the answer right away (or possibly ever) and maybe no one does. Both methods tend to lead people to either fixate on "This is what I was taught, so it must be right," or "This feels right to me, so it must be right," and stop there.
That said, there is a lot to be said for literary study, if only because one can note the many points of difference one has with ancient writers and so get a bit let caught up in the trap of "they agree with me so the must be right about everything!" Plus any ideas and arguments that have been around for a few thousand years have had a lot of opportunities to be torn apart, so there is more confidence that if they have stood the test of time they are higher quality (and more opportunity to find those who disagreed and check out their thoughts.)
I actually meant literacy in my original comment, typing quickly on my phone dosen't help, but I do think literature is a means towards asking some of these larger moral questions. I have more faith in older traditions that have had time like as you said, to hear criticisms and rebuttals of their positions, which could include various religious traditions or philosophical movements. Sometimes, it's even an organization like the Boy Scouts or Scouting, which comes out of a Christian culture, but isn't expressly Christian in practice, although it's within that worldview in service to others or even Eagle Scout projects. I'd argue that having some firm commitment to a religious or philosophical tradition is more beneficial for most people, which even within lets say Catholicism or Islam, or Judaism may have disagreements on various issues, but it dosen't mean that Reform Jews versus Orthodox Jews aren't Jewish, because they still retain theological beliefs and traditions in common. Which tradition would be right for each person is a highly individualized question, but I do believe almost everyone needs some moral framework to build around. Human beings ask the same big questions over and over again throughout history, so the nice thing about Ancient Greek philosophy or Catholic liberation theology, is that other people throughout history have already thought about these questions, and developed their own answers.
this whole idea of going back and forth, and finding the right method works for me. But the whole society must do this together. The trick of getting the "modern" society to function tolerably well is that of having some kind of cultural basis and yet being flexible about it. Jewish people are good at this because they argue back and forth, endlessly.
> If people believe Hamas is justified in killing innocent Israeli children and babies, who have no reasonable culpability in the genesis of the conflict, or weren't even born when the Palestinian displacement/Nakba happened, or Bin Laden was justified in killing almost 3,000 people in NYC to wage Islamic jihad, then they're lost morally.
And if people believe they are not, they are lost epistemically (ontologically, logically, etc).
Literature is great, and you need to force people to read it if there is no other way. That is what schools used to do. So, I would say you cannot force people to read literature if you do not have a stable basis to the society. Persons have to be disciplined and parents these days do not discipline their kids.
And BTW, I say this as somebody who really likes TikTok. I spend an embarassing time on it. I just don't think its creators tend to be particularly well-informed or nuanced. Which, of course, social media is not meant to accommodate.
> They’re humans who are a product of TikTok culture.
a) That is only one layer.
b) Their failings on that layer may be a consequence of the shortcomings of other layers.
c) You yourself are in at least one layer - do you have the ability to accurately identify whether there are any substantial flaws in the one you are in, and whether those flaws have downgraded your cognition in any way? Keep in mind that the device doing the measuring and the device being measured are one in the same..
> TikTok does not reward nuance or deep knowledge of a thing.It’s all about the algo.
Let me guess: you do not have serious depth in ontology, set theory, epistemology, non-binary logic?
And for fun, I will re-ask the question you dodged:
Do you believe yourself to not suffer from similar problems?
That’s a lot of argument around the notion that TikTok could be a forum for serious, informed, sophisticated discourse. But so far, it’s not. I’m not judging everyone on TikTok as being a vapid dunce, but if they do have a particular depth to share on the platform, then my algo certainly isn’t calling for it. And believe me, if I saw it, I would reward it with likes, comments, and shares. But the truth is, in a lot of videos I see, the creators simply fail to display much depth of contextual knowledge or understanding around any given topic. Part of that, I am convinced, is how the platform enables and rewards certain kinds of content. And part of that, I am convinced, is because of that, TikTok draws a certain kind of creator. After all, look at us: we wouldn’t be having this kind of back-and-forth on TikTok. The platform would never let us.
> That’s a lot of argument around the notion that TikTok could be a forum for serious, informed, sophisticated discourse.
That's weird, I literally quoted particular claims of yours, why move the goalposts to this?
Regardless: is your participation here what qualifies for "serious, informed, sophisticated discourse"?
> But so far, it’s not. I’m not judging everyone on TikTok as being a vapid dunce, but if they do have a particular depth to share on the platform, then my algo certainly isn’t calling for it.
Is this to say that you now realize that your experience on TikTok may not be an accurate representation of the thing itself?
> But the truth is, in a lot of videos I see, the creators simply fail to display much depth of contextual knowledge or understanding around any given topic.
Have you perhaps forgotten that you are not a perfectly rational human, that it only seems like you are due to the nature of consciousness and the cultural norms of the culture you grew up in (ie: do not pay attention to such "woo woo")?
> Part of that, I am convinced, is how the platform enables and rewards certain kinds of content. And part of that, I am convinced, is because of that, TikTok draws a certain kind of creator. After all, look at us: we wouldn’t be having this kind of back-and-forth on TikTok. The platform would never let us.
Watch out if someone releases a platform that not only allows it, but disallows people from getting away with the nonsense and delusion going on in this thread. ;)
For fun, I will once again re-ask the question you dodged (and note that there are other questions in my immediately prior comment that you also dodged):
Do you believe yourself to not suffer from similar problems?
I wouldn’t hang this on the Left. A quick spin around the Dumpster Fire Formerly Known as Twitter shows the Right has a pretty serious contact allergy to anything that can be readily fact-checked or merits from saying in the front half of the classroom. I think the larger issue is the attention deficit disorder that social media incubates by the very nature of its platform. When we are chasing clout and clicks - which is all social media really wants because that is all it can monetize - we aren’t chasing ideas. We’re chasing each other.
As somebody on the right, when I get away from my more reliable sources or informed take-havers, and see the low brow/low thought rightwing social media accounts, its a total wake up call. My side isnt “smarter” than the other side, perhaps my circle of influences/media is more enlightened, but theres still a ton of drivel out there that other people eat up.
OH I did not read it closely enough. I see no --- this commenter is saying he is the "smart" right. So, my comment was a little "off." Thanks for catching that...
However, this specific phenomenon of moralism run amok is a problem on the left insofar that it prevents the left from forming a better alternative than the right. If everyone is allergic to facts, and it ESPECIALLY seems like young women who consider themselves progressive are so, then an alternative is impossible to form because we’re in a standoff against the extremists on both sides and unable to form a coalition to defeat them on either side, alone.
This is especially troubling to me as a millennial woman who’s been indoctrinated on social media with nonsense “progressive” ideology. This is far more an issue among college educated or otherwise middle class and above women in my own cohort; not sure about gen z, but as they consider themselves feminists, guessing that feminism’s currently incarnation as an excuse to make any choice look right as long as it feels good is driving this trend.
> A quick spin around the Dumpster Fire Formerly Known as Twitter shows the Right has a pretty serious contact allergy to anything that can be readily fact-checked or merits from saying in the front half of the classroom.
Colloquially it might, but it can not technically.
> Yes. That’s a New Left technique: Facts and history no longer matter. It’s all ideology and power.
Surely. And hallucinating reality into existence and then perceiving and asserting it as if it was reality itself is a technique popular across (almost) all categorical spectrums.
ha, i made that comment so long ago, I forgot about whatever I suggested that you think about, sorry. it was a stupid comment anyway. i just don't think enough of us think about how badly we are treating (or let be treated) so badly these babies of today. from Gaza to Ukraine to Sandy Hook to Twitter to X to YouTube I know we don't treat these children with the respect that they deserve, nor afford them any more rights than we do animals, and in the case of some places on the planet, animal regulations exist when none for children do. So I guess that is the realization that I would hope we would all have. So happy lohsar and may you always be happy.
Yes, and at the time of "corporate media," there was some stable basis to the society, as bad as newspapers were. One may criticize the foundation but there needs to be one.
There is a simpler explanation for the TikTok-bin Laden thing than this moralism-evil thesis. It is this crude law: shallowness, trivia, vacuity and bogus 'knowledge' will always expand to fill the amount of mass-media bandwidth available.
Just riffing on this: I think there's something to the radicalism of TikTok that can be explained by the fact that it's all faces talking into the camera. And faces scream "social proof!" "social proof!" "social proof!"
You may be right about TikTok. But my comment was a more broad-brush, general one about the interface of media technology and human nature...something I often write about on my own 'Stack.
Me too. To what good I wonder, but ya gotta try, no? We are talking babies brains here. Here in this stack, all I see is reference to grown reading adults struggling to comprehend it all. What about the brain at 5? 6? 7? 8? 9? That's the brains captured on TikTok. And there is not a parent to be seen here outraged and on fire.
There aren't a lot of places where the realms of theory and reality meet up on social media, that's for sure. Plenty of opportunity to assert without check.
What I interpret you as having said is, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” And we are here speaking of the nature of a large number of humans... as Quintilian put it "Everyone prefers to have learned, rather than to learn."
So, this leaves autodidact learning or a vast reform of our entire educational system...or personally developing a filtering system for all the noise that is inherent in all media.
It seems to me that one of mankind’s primary issues is discerning the importance of quality versus quantity (see “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)
Yes to all that. All the things you suggest are 'devoutly to be wished' but - as a dyed in the wool pessimist - I'm not holding my breath. Given all you say though, I think you will find this essay interesting: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance struck a chord with me too when I read it as a young man in the early 1970s.
I think you're right to point out that an overdeveloped, overdetermined moral sense can often lead to evil. But isn't there also a danger of an underdeveloped moral sense, too? I think about this a lot because I study antebellum abolitionist culture. In Civil Disobedience, Henry Thoreau wrote:
“There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them…They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect.” This is the plodding, halting, progressive humanism--others might call it liberalism or proceduralism or whatever--that you refer to in this piece. And to me, it seemed insufficient to the moral demands that slavery put on Americans.
In emphasizing the danger of moral commitment--something I often do myself--I think that we also might tend to overlook the dangers of a lack of commitment. For the wild-eyed, religious, and vehement speech and action of U.S. abolitionists helped extinguish slavery in this country.
Of course, I am not saying that any contemporary issue is analogous to slavery; I guess the point is that slavery gives us an example showing that, at times, the ethic of progressive, piecemeal reform and non-interference is not sufficient to a particular moral challenge. The question is how to determine whether one's moral capacity is, as you put it, overdeveloped, underdeveloped, or just right--and in which situations a sense of deep moral commitment is warranted.
Agreed. I think this is precisely what makes moral judgements about human history so complicated - moralism is both the cause of a lot of good, especially changes that are radical and require a lot of effort, but it's also the cause of a lot of evil, and shifting the frame between the two is far easier than any of us would like.
The "plodding, halting progressive" is better thought of as waiting for a leader they trust not to give into the tendency of moralism to overreach and dehumanize. If the only factions doing *anything* are doing it fanatically, better, perhaps, to do nothing?
In particular a "connection to the individual" seems necessary. It's far easier to feel "called upon" by a friend than an idea from the news. When your world is all news, passively read but not contributed to, you are separated from the world of moral agency by a veil, and it is not really a natural human thing to "reach across that veil" into the world of, essentially, stories. It has to grab you.
These kinds of people I think of as having internalized a hierarchy of needs, or of responsibilities: that one must ensure one's own safety first, and then take care of others'. The first may have been achieved but then they do not believe themselves to have any meaningful power to help others. Everything they can do while remaining safe seems to be within a rounding error of nothing. Agree that piecemeal reform is insufficient to moral challenge, but the problem is of how to *activate* the moral agency of these interested-but-at-rest individuals. Solidarity I suppose is the necessary thing, but to just protest en masse feels worthless too. What they really want is to do ONE real and tangibly-good thing, real on the plane of your own lived existence, rather than firing off miniscule actions into the void. These people, I expect, would have sheltered a runaway if asked the right way by the right person.
Hence in short I see this failure mode of underactive moralism as a problem of leadership.
I have. I just don't agree we need to be writing off morality as a weather-related incident, or something we can't have a say in. Throwing out morals, or a consensual morality that describes what is "good" for society, and a commitment to the ethical care of all beings, would be a disaster, and reminds me of other "move fast and break things" ideas of late.
I do NOT mean that morality is weather related !! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Humanity's morale, like the weather, changes in the course of time Whereas the weather may change during the same day, humanity's morale changes through generations and centuries.
Every society has its suitable morale, depending on its size, economics, technique, religion (sic!), environment, etc.
In the global, big picture, they even may be contradictory to each other, but perfectly suitable for the folks adopting it.
Morale has NO global standard; never will have.
Ethics is a wide field to be discussed about. What is ethical to both of us, maybe utterly unethical to some other folks; or vice-versa. Nobody owns the absolute truth; nor ever will own it.
Throwing out morals, leads to the collapse of society; something that reminds me of current affairs ...
oh I see now, a metaphor! But is it? Seems like for 2000 plus or more years, someone had an idea that stuck. And those "morals" have undoubtedly saved more lives than killed. I know, a low bar, but it's a bar. Like a barometer.
it is the mentality of "I'm right, no matter what," and social media really encourages that. But what really is an " overdeveloped moral sense "? More like wrongly developed, isn't that it? Isn't morality an inner sense? Not something to make a person rush to knock over a building.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "inner sense," but I see no reason why an "inner sense" could never cause someone to commit an act of terrorism. Surely every terrorist has some inner sense that committing an act of terrorism is worth doing--otherwise, they'd never commit any acts of terrorism.
I think that, when Hoel is talking about an "overdeveloped moral sense," he's talking about instances when someone's conviction that they have the correct answer to a moral question causes them to hurt others or to try to exert excessive control over them. For example, if someone sincerely believes that abortion is murder, they might see the murder of a doctor who provides abortions as justifiable (if I murder this one person, I will prevent the "murder" of dozens more). This would be, to me, an example of an overdeveloped moral sense because it assumes, with perfect clarity and conviction, the answer to a moral question that is by no means beyond debate.
Could not agree more with your distinction between moralists and sadists.
The difference between the ordinary person and the firing squads of the Holocaust, or murderous jihadists, or the Japanese doomsday cult ‘Aum Shinrikyo’, is a worldview. They are/were ordinary people, who in different circumstances might have been a neighbour, or a friend, or a family member, or us ourselves.
Beware all those who paint the world black or white. Where there is moral certainty, there is permission to pursue any means in the name of the righteous ends.
Well here is a metaphor for ya: Morality can be a painting inclusive of all colors of the rainbow, and woven into elegant tapestries using many mixes of materials and pigments. Morality is made black and white by ill-equipped and ignorant artists, or laypeople who have no business attempting to create or share such muck.
One of my main tasks in my Intro to Christian Ethics class is to disrupt the confusion of moralism for ethics. Moralism is the weaponization of morality to create a hierarchy of good and bad people. So, I spend some time with movies like The Bicycle Thieves or Mi Vida Loca, where sympathetic people do bad things, and get the students to distinguish between acts and character.
It's also occurs to me that Paul does a great job of subverting the apocalyptic symbolic system - like Revelation is a long fantasy of dividing the world into good people and bad people, but Paul uses the same symbolic system to put everyone on an equal moral footing.
I've also assigned bin Laden's text when I discuss terrorism in my death class. The students are generally better than the Tik Tokers at distinguishing between "makes some good points" and "has a valid argument."
That is an insightful point about moralism. It would be nice if there were some pithy memorable way of conveying the lesson distinguishing moralism from ethics and acts from character. Dare I suggest a TikTok meme video? Even if it merely encourages someone to pause before going on a crusade and abandoning nuance and uncertainty it might be worthwhile.
Morality/ethics isn't something you talk about. It is an inner sense. And society has to have some kind of structure to it, in order for persons to be able to develop that moral sense for themselves. Talking about "overdetermined moralism" puts it on the outside. That is a psychopathology.
Who would have thought that there are two sides a story? Who maybe considered that people aren’t “just evil?” Who? How many times must we be shocked to find that perhaps we shouldn’t make generic high level criticisms especially when the stories are obviously shaped to fit the ideologies of the home country. And yet we will return to exactly that in due time when the next scapegoat for all our problems becomes available.
Well, I am running into several other examples of "evil is the corrupted willingness to do good" in my readings lately (e.g. history of the concept of "groupthink," a term that seems like it is from the seventies.) I therefore think this idea is not limited to Badiou.
A brilliant perspective. For those who wish to dig more deeply into this, I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt's (deservedly influential) The Righteous Mind.
Hitlers very power was his logic--he just took it to a terrifying extreme. The perversion most evident in the use of human bodies to make soap and lampshades.
The “GAI logic” combined with the way so many people are diving into the mindset of “we won’t have to teach our children to write anymore now we have LLM/” which will surely annihilate the way people read and evaluate information is very very concerning.
I admit a lot of the OBL apologetics awoke something grumpy in me. But then I lived it (from afar, granted). I had years to go through emotions about it all, and what I thought of my country. Many people “awakened” by his banal letter didn’t watch friends go off to war amd come back not the same. I did, again, from afar. I was safe and raised two great kids. I have tried to teach them about the banality of evil. To be humanist thinkers. And to shed no tears for people who choose wanton murder. I see them respond to Gaza with, I hope, appropriate consternation and empathy. To understand there are no easy answers, but oppression doesn’t have to mean to choose murder. I hope those reading the letter come around to ponder it and know that evil is a choice.
The one thing I would (sort of) disagree with here is the assumption that the oppressed person in question is consciously choosing to murder. I in no way mean to imply that the murder is justified or excused; it is definitely unjustifiably horrific, and the perpetrator must be held accountable. But the fact is that unresolved trauma (e.g. PTSD/CPTSD) can profoundly impact a person's ability to manage their own reactivity. It also impairs a person's ability to distinguish between immediate threats and triggered felt sense of past threats. One of the most insidious aspects of oppression is that it is ubiquitous and relentless, making any sort of recovery from trauma extraordinarily difficult, and sometimes impossible. In these situations we need a different way of assessing culpability, and we have to be clear on whether we are more intent on identifying a demon to punish, or on finding a way to resolve the larger collective problem that is the fertile breeding ground for traumatized victims who truly believe they have no other choice. We can either choose to blame, dehumanize, and penalize the murderer or we can choose to hold them accountable by recognizing the bigger problem and insisting that they heal from the trauma and make reparations (if feasible and appropriate). If we choose this route, it means agreeing to the equitable changes that are necessary to give them access to the resources necessary to heal.
I take your point. I think we mostly agree. , especially about hoping for a larger, collective improvement of a terribly traumatic situation.
I think you’re right to say something. My best understanding is that we are (slightly?) disagreeing about whether people have a choice and whether it’s the time to judge them for choosing wrong acts. I think it is always the time to say murder is wrong and it is always a behavior for which the murderer is responsible. I have some empathy for them, for the victims of trauma, and so on, just as I do for those murdered. Both things can be true. But the murderers are responsible nonetheless, tragic as it might even be.
I actually agree with you on murder always being wrong, and I agree the murderers must be held accountable; otherwise trauma would just become an excuse for violence. But I do think that responsibility and accountability can be demanded in a way that focuses on healing and reparation, as opposed to demonizing and penalizing just for the sake of punishment (which is the preferred method in most cultures). And, the other important aspect for me is that when violence is a reaction to oppressive trauma, the system that allows or encourages that oppression is also culpable, and must also be held responsible.
This explains the strange responses I have gotten when I try to explain the strategic reasons Hamas carried out their recent attack. I was accused of being a Hamas sympathizer because I said it wasn’t merely to “kill some Jews” but to disrupt a deal between Israel and Saudia Arabia. Obviously Hamas would kill all the Jewish people (including myself) if they could, but they can’t, and that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some logic and moralism behind their actions.
Nice link! I had read another analysis of the numbers like this but not this one. I definitely agree that the youth are not all suddenly under the sway of Bin Laden, and obviously in my own post I'm more interested in the particular psychological reactions of the people who did find him convincing. Regardless, as to the "was this a trend or not" question - a lot here depends on what counts as views on TikTok. 14 million is a lot of views! Even if it's just for a scroll by, like on X. People can say "it's not that much on TikTok" but it's still 14 million. Personally, I'd like to see some numbers of other organic trends the same day (stuff that's not ad campaigns, etc). The letter was still taken down by The Guardian. TikTok still cracked down on the videos. And even if the number of initial posters was quite small, there are all sorts of things that essentially no one in their right minds ever says they support. I do think Bin Laden's inclusion in some people's Overton window is probably meaningful, even if it's just for a small population on TikTok. But, with all that said, I wish the MSM articles had contained more analysis about numbers of videos and views. I don't even think the hashtag was some highly revealing and highly particular reflection of Gen Z, nor necessarily reflective of manipulation by TikTok, which is what a lot of the panic in the media was about.
Yeah I think that's all fair. Based on my experience of TikTok it's not actually that implausible a thing to have happened at scale - I have seen lots of equally simplistic shock takes looking for attention around the same sort of subjects. And so much of what makes for big stories today online is a cycle of reactions to reactions to reactions and infinitum anyway
What they should be learning is that smart people with Anti-Social disorder are very good at creating “social camouflage” to rationalize their desire to inflict suffering on others.
Hit the mute button: Do not listen to what they say. Watch what they do. Their actions reveal their true intentions.
One of the things that really distresses me when TikTok goes off on geopolitics is how grossly under-read so many TikTokkers really are. A lot of these folks were little children when 9/11 happened, and have since informed themselves almost purely through social media. As much as they decry "corporate media," they are themselves ardent consumers of media that is even more slanted, more slipshod, and more irresponsible than what they rely upon. How seriously are we to take such hot takes, really?
I definitely worry about the literacy of generations who grew up with screens. In fact, there was an entire ending portion of this essay about how literature is the remedy to this. Personally, I don't normally spend time writing about "hot takes" on TikTok (I would eventually go insane), precisely because I don't take a lot of them seriously. But this one seemed directly related to an issue I've been thinking about for years.
The whole idea of formal literacy, in being able to write well and develop reading comprehension skills at a very high level, seems to have always been relegated to a small percentage of the population that had been blessed by nature/God/luck etc. One of the problems this approach had was the disadvantage of being a highly paternalistic approach, in that the elites through print media, radio, and TV set the terms of what respectable people beneath them should believe. But now the gatekeepers are gone, experts are scorned, and individuals increasingly believe they don't need moral or intellectual guidance. Individualism means they can figure it out on their own. Increasingly, I think that's been proven wrong. If people believe Hamas is justified in killing innocent Israeli children and babies, who have no reasonable culpability in the genesis of the conflict, or weren't even born when the Palestinian displacement/Nakba happened, or Bin Laden was justified in killing almost 3,000 people in NYC to wage Islamic jihad, then they're lost morally. There's two articles, one in the Atlantic by David Brooks, and another in the Atlantic about the Founders that influenced how I feel about this. I highly recommend both of them.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/09/us-culture-moral-education-formation/674765/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/
I think the danger there is the belief that either method, top down definition of the good or figuring out for yourself, can reliably get you to understanding the good. Because as Quintilian put it "Everyone prefers to have learned, rather than to learn." That is, they want the answer and to be done with it, instead of going slowly and figuring things out with the knowledge that they won't have the answer right away (or possibly ever) and maybe no one does. Both methods tend to lead people to either fixate on "This is what I was taught, so it must be right," or "This feels right to me, so it must be right," and stop there.
That said, there is a lot to be said for literary study, if only because one can note the many points of difference one has with ancient writers and so get a bit let caught up in the trap of "they agree with me so the must be right about everything!" Plus any ideas and arguments that have been around for a few thousand years have had a lot of opportunities to be torn apart, so there is more confidence that if they have stood the test of time they are higher quality (and more opportunity to find those who disagreed and check out their thoughts.)
I actually meant literacy in my original comment, typing quickly on my phone dosen't help, but I do think literature is a means towards asking some of these larger moral questions. I have more faith in older traditions that have had time like as you said, to hear criticisms and rebuttals of their positions, which could include various religious traditions or philosophical movements. Sometimes, it's even an organization like the Boy Scouts or Scouting, which comes out of a Christian culture, but isn't expressly Christian in practice, although it's within that worldview in service to others or even Eagle Scout projects. I'd argue that having some firm commitment to a religious or philosophical tradition is more beneficial for most people, which even within lets say Catholicism or Islam, or Judaism may have disagreements on various issues, but it dosen't mean that Reform Jews versus Orthodox Jews aren't Jewish, because they still retain theological beliefs and traditions in common. Which tradition would be right for each person is a highly individualized question, but I do believe almost everyone needs some moral framework to build around. Human beings ask the same big questions over and over again throughout history, so the nice thing about Ancient Greek philosophy or Catholic liberation theology, is that other people throughout history have already thought about these questions, and developed their own answers.
this whole idea of going back and forth, and finding the right method works for me. But the whole society must do this together. The trick of getting the "modern" society to function tolerably well is that of having some kind of cultural basis and yet being flexible about it. Jewish people are good at this because they argue back and forth, endlessly.
Looking forward to reading those links. Thank you for sharing.
Sometimes I pithily declare that “just because someone is literate does not mean they know how to read.”
Of course, the people who don’t realize that they never learned to think (ie, never received a liberal education) have no idea what is meant by that.
Bold wondering, but I can’t help but think that this phenomenon--among others!--can be traced back to the Reformation.
> If people believe Hamas is justified in killing innocent Israeli children and babies, who have no reasonable culpability in the genesis of the conflict, or weren't even born when the Palestinian displacement/Nakba happened, or Bin Laden was justified in killing almost 3,000 people in NYC to wage Islamic jihad, then they're lost morally.
And if people believe they are not, they are lost epistemically (ontologically, logically, etc).
Literature is great, and you need to force people to read it if there is no other way. That is what schools used to do. So, I would say you cannot force people to read literature if you do not have a stable basis to the society. Persons have to be disciplined and parents these days do not discipline their kids.
Could you expand a little on literature being the remedy?
I literally just made a tiktok about this. They didn't read this letter or they didn't read it right
Alternatively:
a) you are not perfectly rational
b) It is a subjective matter
And BTW, I say this as somebody who really likes TikTok. I spend an embarassing time on it. I just don't think its creators tend to be particularly well-informed or nuanced. Which, of course, social media is not meant to accommodate.
> I just don't think its creators tend to be particularly well-informed or nuanced.
This is because they are humans, and a product of the culture they grew up in that does not teach skills in self-awareness.
Do you believe yourself to not suffer from similar problems?
They’re humans who are a product of TikTok culture. TikTok does not reward nuance or deep knowledge of a thing.It’s all about the algo.
> They’re humans who are a product of TikTok culture.
a) That is only one layer.
b) Their failings on that layer may be a consequence of the shortcomings of other layers.
c) You yourself are in at least one layer - do you have the ability to accurately identify whether there are any substantial flaws in the one you are in, and whether those flaws have downgraded your cognition in any way? Keep in mind that the device doing the measuring and the device being measured are one in the same..
> TikTok does not reward nuance or deep knowledge of a thing.It’s all about the algo.
Let me guess: you do not have serious depth in ontology, set theory, epistemology, non-binary logic?
And for fun, I will re-ask the question you dodged:
Do you believe yourself to not suffer from similar problems?
That’s a lot of argument around the notion that TikTok could be a forum for serious, informed, sophisticated discourse. But so far, it’s not. I’m not judging everyone on TikTok as being a vapid dunce, but if they do have a particular depth to share on the platform, then my algo certainly isn’t calling for it. And believe me, if I saw it, I would reward it with likes, comments, and shares. But the truth is, in a lot of videos I see, the creators simply fail to display much depth of contextual knowledge or understanding around any given topic. Part of that, I am convinced, is how the platform enables and rewards certain kinds of content. And part of that, I am convinced, is because of that, TikTok draws a certain kind of creator. After all, look at us: we wouldn’t be having this kind of back-and-forth on TikTok. The platform would never let us.
> That’s a lot of argument around the notion that TikTok could be a forum for serious, informed, sophisticated discourse.
That's weird, I literally quoted particular claims of yours, why move the goalposts to this?
Regardless: is your participation here what qualifies for "serious, informed, sophisticated discourse"?
> But so far, it’s not. I’m not judging everyone on TikTok as being a vapid dunce, but if they do have a particular depth to share on the platform, then my algo certainly isn’t calling for it.
Is this to say that you now realize that your experience on TikTok may not be an accurate representation of the thing itself?
> But the truth is, in a lot of videos I see, the creators simply fail to display much depth of contextual knowledge or understanding around any given topic.
Have you perhaps forgotten that you are not a perfectly rational human, that it only seems like you are due to the nature of consciousness and the cultural norms of the culture you grew up in (ie: do not pay attention to such "woo woo")?
> Part of that, I am convinced, is how the platform enables and rewards certain kinds of content. And part of that, I am convinced, is because of that, TikTok draws a certain kind of creator. After all, look at us: we wouldn’t be having this kind of back-and-forth on TikTok. The platform would never let us.
Watch out if someone releases a platform that not only allows it, but disallows people from getting away with the nonsense and delusion going on in this thread. ;)
For fun, I will once again re-ask the question you dodged (and note that there are other questions in my immediately prior comment that you also dodged):
Do you believe yourself to not suffer from similar problems?
Yes. That’s a New Left technique: Facts and history no longer matter. It’s all ideology and power.
I wouldn’t hang this on the Left. A quick spin around the Dumpster Fire Formerly Known as Twitter shows the Right has a pretty serious contact allergy to anything that can be readily fact-checked or merits from saying in the front half of the classroom. I think the larger issue is the attention deficit disorder that social media incubates by the very nature of its platform. When we are chasing clout and clicks - which is all social media really wants because that is all it can monetize - we aren’t chasing ideas. We’re chasing each other.
As somebody on the right, when I get away from my more reliable sources or informed take-havers, and see the low brow/low thought rightwing social media accounts, its a total wake up call. My side isnt “smarter” than the other side, perhaps my circle of influences/media is more enlightened, but theres still a ton of drivel out there that other people eat up.
Well, that's fine if you be on the right, but you are not exactly in the fast lane.
Do you believe yourself to be in the fast lane? And, are you "measuring" on an absolute, relative, or perhaps some other scale?
OH I did not read it closely enough. I see no --- this commenter is saying he is the "smart" right. So, my comment was a little "off." Thanks for catching that...
However, this specific phenomenon of moralism run amok is a problem on the left insofar that it prevents the left from forming a better alternative than the right. If everyone is allergic to facts, and it ESPECIALLY seems like young women who consider themselves progressive are so, then an alternative is impossible to form because we’re in a standoff against the extremists on both sides and unable to form a coalition to defeat them on either side, alone.
This is especially troubling to me as a millennial woman who’s been indoctrinated on social media with nonsense “progressive” ideology. This is far more an issue among college educated or otherwise middle class and above women in my own cohort; not sure about gen z, but as they consider themselves feminists, guessing that feminism’s currently incarnation as an excuse to make any choice look right as long as it feels good is driving this trend.
> A quick spin around the Dumpster Fire Formerly Known as Twitter shows the Right has a pretty serious contact allergy to anything that can be readily fact-checked or merits from saying in the front half of the classroom.
Colloquially it might, but it can not technically.
> Yes. That’s a New Left technique: Facts and history no longer matter. It’s all ideology and power.
Surely. And hallucinating reality into existence and then perceiving and asserting it as if it was reality itself is a technique popular across (almost) all categorical spectrums.
No, a lot of them (the majority?) are children, full stop. Think about that.
Ok, I have thought about it - should I have come to some sort of a realization?
ha, i made that comment so long ago, I forgot about whatever I suggested that you think about, sorry. it was a stupid comment anyway. i just don't think enough of us think about how badly we are treating (or let be treated) so badly these babies of today. from Gaza to Ukraine to Sandy Hook to Twitter to X to YouTube I know we don't treat these children with the respect that they deserve, nor afford them any more rights than we do animals, and in the case of some places on the planet, animal regulations exist when none for children do. So I guess that is the realization that I would hope we would all have. So happy lohsar and may you always be happy.
This is the sort of thinking we need more of!
Yes, and at the time of "corporate media," there was some stable basis to the society, as bad as newspapers were. One may criticize the foundation but there needs to be one.
There is a simpler explanation for the TikTok-bin Laden thing than this moralism-evil thesis. It is this crude law: shallowness, trivia, vacuity and bogus 'knowledge' will always expand to fill the amount of mass-media bandwidth available.
Just riffing on this: I think there's something to the radicalism of TikTok that can be explained by the fact that it's all faces talking into the camera. And faces scream "social proof!" "social proof!" "social proof!"
You may be right about TikTok. But my comment was a more broad-brush, general one about the interface of media technology and human nature...something I often write about on my own 'Stack.
Me too. To what good I wonder, but ya gotta try, no? We are talking babies brains here. Here in this stack, all I see is reference to grown reading adults struggling to comprehend it all. What about the brain at 5? 6? 7? 8? 9? That's the brains captured on TikTok. And there is not a parent to be seen here outraged and on fire.
There aren't a lot of places where the realms of theory and reality meet up on social media, that's for sure. Plenty of opportunity to assert without check.
See also the "reality" your mind is projecting into itself.
Spotting errors in the cognition of others is easy, spotting it in oneself is not so easy.
What I interpret you as having said is, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” And we are here speaking of the nature of a large number of humans... as Quintilian put it "Everyone prefers to have learned, rather than to learn."
So, this leaves autodidact learning or a vast reform of our entire educational system...or personally developing a filtering system for all the noise that is inherent in all media.
It seems to me that one of mankind’s primary issues is discerning the importance of quality versus quantity (see “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.)
Yes to all that. All the things you suggest are 'devoutly to be wished' but - as a dyed in the wool pessimist - I'm not holding my breath. Given all you say though, I think you will find this essay interesting: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/are-we-making-progress
Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance struck a chord with me too when I read it as a young man in the early 1970s.
Have you any interest in whether this explanation is true, and comprehensive?
I think you're right to point out that an overdeveloped, overdetermined moral sense can often lead to evil. But isn't there also a danger of an underdeveloped moral sense, too? I think about this a lot because I study antebellum abolitionist culture. In Civil Disobedience, Henry Thoreau wrote:
“There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them…They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect.” This is the plodding, halting, progressive humanism--others might call it liberalism or proceduralism or whatever--that you refer to in this piece. And to me, it seemed insufficient to the moral demands that slavery put on Americans.
In emphasizing the danger of moral commitment--something I often do myself--I think that we also might tend to overlook the dangers of a lack of commitment. For the wild-eyed, religious, and vehement speech and action of U.S. abolitionists helped extinguish slavery in this country.
Of course, I am not saying that any contemporary issue is analogous to slavery; I guess the point is that slavery gives us an example showing that, at times, the ethic of progressive, piecemeal reform and non-interference is not sufficient to a particular moral challenge. The question is how to determine whether one's moral capacity is, as you put it, overdeveloped, underdeveloped, or just right--and in which situations a sense of deep moral commitment is warranted.
Agreed. I think this is precisely what makes moral judgements about human history so complicated - moralism is both the cause of a lot of good, especially changes that are radical and require a lot of effort, but it's also the cause of a lot of evil, and shifting the frame between the two is far easier than any of us would like.
The "plodding, halting progressive" is better thought of as waiting for a leader they trust not to give into the tendency of moralism to overreach and dehumanize. If the only factions doing *anything* are doing it fanatically, better, perhaps, to do nothing?
In particular a "connection to the individual" seems necessary. It's far easier to feel "called upon" by a friend than an idea from the news. When your world is all news, passively read but not contributed to, you are separated from the world of moral agency by a veil, and it is not really a natural human thing to "reach across that veil" into the world of, essentially, stories. It has to grab you.
These kinds of people I think of as having internalized a hierarchy of needs, or of responsibilities: that one must ensure one's own safety first, and then take care of others'. The first may have been achieved but then they do not believe themselves to have any meaningful power to help others. Everything they can do while remaining safe seems to be within a rounding error of nothing. Agree that piecemeal reform is insufficient to moral challenge, but the problem is of how to *activate* the moral agency of these interested-but-at-rest individuals. Solidarity I suppose is the necessary thing, but to just protest en masse feels worthless too. What they really want is to do ONE real and tangibly-good thing, real on the plane of your own lived existence, rather than firing off miniscule actions into the void. These people, I expect, would have sheltered a runaway if asked the right way by the right person.
Hence in short I see this failure mode of underactive moralism as a problem of leadership.
"Moral" is a term like "weather" ...
Looking at the big picture through time and evolving of humanity, it simply was\is\can be anything ...
No, morality is not the weather. We have a say in what direction the proverbial wind blows here.
? ? ?
Please be so kind as to re-read my previous comment.
I have. I just don't agree we need to be writing off morality as a weather-related incident, or something we can't have a say in. Throwing out morals, or a consensual morality that describes what is "good" for society, and a commitment to the ethical care of all beings, would be a disaster, and reminds me of other "move fast and break things" ideas of late.
I do NOT mean that morality is weather related !! 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Humanity's morale, like the weather, changes in the course of time Whereas the weather may change during the same day, humanity's morale changes through generations and centuries.
Every society has its suitable morale, depending on its size, economics, technique, religion (sic!), environment, etc.
In the global, big picture, they even may be contradictory to each other, but perfectly suitable for the folks adopting it.
Morale has NO global standard; never will have.
Ethics is a wide field to be discussed about. What is ethical to both of us, maybe utterly unethical to some other folks; or vice-versa. Nobody owns the absolute truth; nor ever will own it.
Throwing out morals, leads to the collapse of society; something that reminds me of current affairs ...
Have a nice time !!
oh I see now, a metaphor! But is it? Seems like for 2000 plus or more years, someone had an idea that stuck. And those "morals" have undoubtedly saved more lives than killed. I know, a low bar, but it's a bar. Like a barometer.
it is the mentality of "I'm right, no matter what," and social media really encourages that. But what really is an " overdeveloped moral sense "? More like wrongly developed, isn't that it? Isn't morality an inner sense? Not something to make a person rush to knock over a building.
I'm not sure what you mean by an "inner sense," but I see no reason why an "inner sense" could never cause someone to commit an act of terrorism. Surely every terrorist has some inner sense that committing an act of terrorism is worth doing--otherwise, they'd never commit any acts of terrorism.
I think that, when Hoel is talking about an "overdeveloped moral sense," he's talking about instances when someone's conviction that they have the correct answer to a moral question causes them to hurt others or to try to exert excessive control over them. For example, if someone sincerely believes that abortion is murder, they might see the murder of a doctor who provides abortions as justifiable (if I murder this one person, I will prevent the "murder" of dozens more). This would be, to me, an example of an overdeveloped moral sense because it assumes, with perfect clarity and conviction, the answer to a moral question that is by no means beyond debate.
if you do not know what is meant by "inner sense," this is also troubling. That indicates that this whole idea is now foreign to many persons.
Could not agree more with your distinction between moralists and sadists.
The difference between the ordinary person and the firing squads of the Holocaust, or murderous jihadists, or the Japanese doomsday cult ‘Aum Shinrikyo’, is a worldview. They are/were ordinary people, who in different circumstances might have been a neighbour, or a friend, or a family member, or us ourselves.
Beware all those who paint the world black or white. Where there is moral certainty, there is permission to pursue any means in the name of the righteous ends.
Well here is a metaphor for ya: Morality can be a painting inclusive of all colors of the rainbow, and woven into elegant tapestries using many mixes of materials and pigments. Morality is made black and white by ill-equipped and ignorant artists, or laypeople who have no business attempting to create or share such muck.
I like that a lot
One of my main tasks in my Intro to Christian Ethics class is to disrupt the confusion of moralism for ethics. Moralism is the weaponization of morality to create a hierarchy of good and bad people. So, I spend some time with movies like The Bicycle Thieves or Mi Vida Loca, where sympathetic people do bad things, and get the students to distinguish between acts and character.
It's also occurs to me that Paul does a great job of subverting the apocalyptic symbolic system - like Revelation is a long fantasy of dividing the world into good people and bad people, but Paul uses the same symbolic system to put everyone on an equal moral footing.
I've also assigned bin Laden's text when I discuss terrorism in my death class. The students are generally better than the Tik Tokers at distinguishing between "makes some good points" and "has a valid argument."
That is an insightful point about moralism. It would be nice if there were some pithy memorable way of conveying the lesson distinguishing moralism from ethics and acts from character. Dare I suggest a TikTok meme video? Even if it merely encourages someone to pause before going on a crusade and abandoning nuance and uncertainty it might be worthwhile.
Morality/ethics isn't something you talk about. It is an inner sense. And society has to have some kind of structure to it, in order for persons to be able to develop that moral sense for themselves. Talking about "overdetermined moralism" puts it on the outside. That is a psychopathology.
Who would have thought that there are two sides a story? Who maybe considered that people aren’t “just evil?” Who? How many times must we be shocked to find that perhaps we shouldn’t make generic high level criticisms especially when the stories are obviously shaped to fit the ideologies of the home country. And yet we will return to exactly that in due time when the next scapegoat for all our problems becomes available.
Sir: are you trying to ruin the fun everyone is having here exercising their imaginations? ;)
Badiou makes a similar point in his Ethics - that evil is the corrupted willingness to do good.
Oh that's interesting - been a long time since I read Badiou. Mostly his stuff on emergence.
Well, I am running into several other examples of "evil is the corrupted willingness to do good" in my readings lately (e.g. history of the concept of "groupthink," a term that seems like it is from the seventies.) I therefore think this idea is not limited to Badiou.
A brilliant perspective. For those who wish to dig more deeply into this, I highly recommend Jonathan Haidt's (deservedly influential) The Righteous Mind.
Hitlers very power was his logic--he just took it to a terrifying extreme. The perversion most evident in the use of human bodies to make soap and lampshades.
Just waiting to see the "facts" humanity will have to face from the upcoming GAI-logic ...
The “GAI logic” combined with the way so many people are diving into the mindset of “we won’t have to teach our children to write anymore now we have LLM/” which will surely annihilate the way people read and evaluate information is very very concerning.
BINGO !!
Just ONE facet of the trouble ahead ...
Um... Isabel... my sources tell me that did not happen. Do a search on this.
I admit a lot of the OBL apologetics awoke something grumpy in me. But then I lived it (from afar, granted). I had years to go through emotions about it all, and what I thought of my country. Many people “awakened” by his banal letter didn’t watch friends go off to war amd come back not the same. I did, again, from afar. I was safe and raised two great kids. I have tried to teach them about the banality of evil. To be humanist thinkers. And to shed no tears for people who choose wanton murder. I see them respond to Gaza with, I hope, appropriate consternation and empathy. To understand there are no easy answers, but oppression doesn’t have to mean to choose murder. I hope those reading the letter come around to ponder it and know that evil is a choice.
The one thing I would (sort of) disagree with here is the assumption that the oppressed person in question is consciously choosing to murder. I in no way mean to imply that the murder is justified or excused; it is definitely unjustifiably horrific, and the perpetrator must be held accountable. But the fact is that unresolved trauma (e.g. PTSD/CPTSD) can profoundly impact a person's ability to manage their own reactivity. It also impairs a person's ability to distinguish between immediate threats and triggered felt sense of past threats. One of the most insidious aspects of oppression is that it is ubiquitous and relentless, making any sort of recovery from trauma extraordinarily difficult, and sometimes impossible. In these situations we need a different way of assessing culpability, and we have to be clear on whether we are more intent on identifying a demon to punish, or on finding a way to resolve the larger collective problem that is the fertile breeding ground for traumatized victims who truly believe they have no other choice. We can either choose to blame, dehumanize, and penalize the murderer or we can choose to hold them accountable by recognizing the bigger problem and insisting that they heal from the trauma and make reparations (if feasible and appropriate). If we choose this route, it means agreeing to the equitable changes that are necessary to give them access to the resources necessary to heal.
I take your point. I think we mostly agree. , especially about hoping for a larger, collective improvement of a terribly traumatic situation.
I think you’re right to say something. My best understanding is that we are (slightly?) disagreeing about whether people have a choice and whether it’s the time to judge them for choosing wrong acts. I think it is always the time to say murder is wrong and it is always a behavior for which the murderer is responsible. I have some empathy for them, for the victims of trauma, and so on, just as I do for those murdered. Both things can be true. But the murderers are responsible nonetheless, tragic as it might even be.
I actually agree with you on murder always being wrong, and I agree the murderers must be held accountable; otherwise trauma would just become an excuse for violence. But I do think that responsibility and accountability can be demanded in a way that focuses on healing and reparation, as opposed to demonizing and penalizing just for the sake of punishment (which is the preferred method in most cultures). And, the other important aspect for me is that when violence is a reaction to oppressive trauma, the system that allows or encourages that oppression is also culpable, and must also be held responsible.
This explains the strange responses I have gotten when I try to explain the strategic reasons Hamas carried out their recent attack. I was accused of being a Hamas sympathizer because I said it wasn’t merely to “kill some Jews” but to disrupt a deal between Israel and Saudia Arabia. Obviously Hamas would kill all the Jewish people (including myself) if they could, but they can’t, and that doesn’t mean there wasn’t some logic and moralism behind their actions.
This is good on how the whole thing is more of a moral panic in the mainstream rather than anything that was actually at all big on TikTok really - most of the boost seems to have come from the mainstream panic itself: https://tiktoktiktoktiktok.substack.com/p/115-the-osama-bin-laden-tiktok-panic
Your point still stands of course, but worth bearing in mind
Nice link! I had read another analysis of the numbers like this but not this one. I definitely agree that the youth are not all suddenly under the sway of Bin Laden, and obviously in my own post I'm more interested in the particular psychological reactions of the people who did find him convincing. Regardless, as to the "was this a trend or not" question - a lot here depends on what counts as views on TikTok. 14 million is a lot of views! Even if it's just for a scroll by, like on X. People can say "it's not that much on TikTok" but it's still 14 million. Personally, I'd like to see some numbers of other organic trends the same day (stuff that's not ad campaigns, etc). The letter was still taken down by The Guardian. TikTok still cracked down on the videos. And even if the number of initial posters was quite small, there are all sorts of things that essentially no one in their right minds ever says they support. I do think Bin Laden's inclusion in some people's Overton window is probably meaningful, even if it's just for a small population on TikTok. But, with all that said, I wish the MSM articles had contained more analysis about numbers of videos and views. I don't even think the hashtag was some highly revealing and highly particular reflection of Gen Z, nor necessarily reflective of manipulation by TikTok, which is what a lot of the panic in the media was about.
Yeah I think that's all fair. Based on my experience of TikTok it's not actually that implausible a thing to have happened at scale - I have seen lots of equally simplistic shock takes looking for attention around the same sort of subjects. And so much of what makes for big stories today online is a cycle of reactions to reactions to reactions and infinitum anyway
Folks need to re-read Martha Gellhorn's work, "Eichmann and the Private Conscience"
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/62feb/eichmann.htm
I also recommend Unprincipled Virtue by Arpaly
I wrote about this recently as a similar problem vexing critiques of technology: why not become Kaczynski?
https://myleswerntz.substack.com/p/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about
Yeah this feels like the perennial rediscovery of Uncle Ted by the youth
What they should be learning is that smart people with Anti-Social disorder are very good at creating “social camouflage” to rationalize their desire to inflict suffering on others.
Hit the mute button: Do not listen to what they say. Watch what they do. Their actions reveal their true intentions.
"You cannot, by definition, abuse power if you are a victim" provides enough cover for anything.
And that their views are dangerously close to Bin Laden’s.
And where these views naturally lead.
I hope that this a big wake-up moment for at least a few of them.
https://apple.news/ANk0lMKg9SWe0yGDeptj1Sg