Cheat codes

I was reading an assigned poetry book for a college course several years ago. One of the poems began like this:

Up up down down left right left right B A start. 

The professor, a gen Xer, and I, a Xennial, were the only ones in the class of early Gen Zers who got the reference. That sequence is the cheat code to the game Contra on the original Nintendo system.

When I was a kid, everyone knew that code. It passed from gamer to gamer, like a piece of juicy gossip. The author of the poetry book is a Gen Xer who grew up in North Carolina. I had no idea how prevalent this code was so far from my home town. Although my generation's childhood was more sheltered than, say, the Boomers, we still grew up before the Internet was a thing. That means this cheat code spread due to the strength of social capital.

I'm not sure the same phenomenon can happen with today's kids, especially in a post-COVID world. But I'm not sure that it matters. 

The other day I finally gave in to my eight-year-old son's pleading and played Minecraft with him. His depth of knowledge of the game exceeds the cumulative knowledge of all the games I have ever played. He knows how to craft and enchant complex weapons, how to build portals, and he beats me in combat with ease, all while calling me a "newb."

He's played online with a friend a handful of times, otherwise he has learned all of this on his own. When he's not playing Minecraft, he's watching videos of YouTubers playing Minecraft and learning from them.

When I was a kid, playing video games was a social event. You learned how to beat Don Flamenco (dodge his big uppercut, then alternate left and right hits to the head until he falls) by playing with friends. My son learns these things on his own. While he is probably lacking in the development of social skills, his technical knowledge has far surpassed any level I could ever have attained.

I definitely worry about the decline of social capital, and if this is evidence of that, but I also wonder if it even matters. I wonder if technology has made it so he'll be able to solve problems on his own. 

I still think social skills are important for mental health. Having a community reduces the odds of being a mass shooter or being seduced by radical ideology. But I'm no longer convinced you need it for professional success.

The Imbalance of Cultural Power

tldr

• Our system of government is set up to encourage equilibrium, which prevents an ideological takeover of the state.
• We have no such system to prevent an ideological takeover of the market or the culture.
• We're probably just going through a "tight" culture phase as a response to a perceived threat, and things will level out on its own with time.

I.

I sense a contradiction in the mind of our Founding Fathers. One the one hand, they seemed concerned with "factionalism" and the tendency for societies to fall into a sort of dictatorship. Built into many of their ideas was the concept of equilibrium. They used checks and balances to ensure that one party could not overwhelm and control the government.

However, they were also a tolerant society. They focused on things like freedom of religion and the sovereignty of states. This is where American multiculturalism began.

The contradiction I'm referring to stems from the idea that, in the absence of a cultural equilibrium, one culture could come to overwhelm society and punish dissenters. "Punish", in this sense, does not mean via the state, but rather via the market (getting people fired) and the community (social isolation). 

So why, if the founders were worried about the balance of power, did they never think of the potential for a culture coup?

It's possible that they thought they solved this worry with laws written to ensure freedom of religion. Specifically, there is the No Religious Test clause which states that "no federal officeholder or employee can be required to adhere to or accept any particular religion or doctrine as a prerequisite to holding a federal office or a federal government job." 

At the time, culture mapped pretty well onto religion, so that took care of the problem. It also mapped pretty well onto geography, thus federalism helped ensure a healthy balance of, and respect for, power at the state level. So a religious belief couldn't turn our federal government into a theocracy and the states could, to some degree, maintain their specific culture.

But the founders probably never envisioned a future in which religion would decline so much that new secular beliefs, unbeholden to these laws, would arise in their place and threaten the balance of power.

I wonder how the founders would feel about Ibram Kendi's vision of an antiracist amendment that would be "comprised of formally trained experts on racism" who, among other things "monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas" and would be "empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas."

How does it sound if we tweak that just a bit? A Christian amendment comprised of formally trained experts on Christianity to monitor public officials for expressions of heresy and be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their antichristian policy and ideas.

I think this idea is highly unlikely to pass (however, there is apparently a reeducation camp going on for white males working at the federal government's premier nuclear research lab) but I do worry about cultural power.

II.

Things look much different now in 2020. It seems that, at one point, one's country of origin predicted one's religion, which predicted one's culture. Now, culture is different. I'm not even sure if it's the right word because what I'm talking about is more of an ideology. 

Whereas ethnicity or religion might have predicted how one voted, today the strongest predictor is whether you drive or pickup or a Prius. And the origins of this behavior begin in elementary school.

Paul Graham uses a four quandrant model to describe different personalities. 

"Imagine a Cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top.

 The resulting four quadrants define four types of people. Starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise: aggressively conventional-minded, passively conventional-minded, passively independent-minded, and aggressively independent-minded."

He then goes to characterize the type of school-aged child who fits in each quadrant.

"The kids in the upper left quadrant, the aggressively conventional-minded ones, are the tattletales. They believe not only that rules must be obeyed, but that those who disobey them must be punished.

The kids in the lower left quadrant, the passively conventional-minded, are the sheep. They're careful to obey the rules, but when other kids break them, their impulse is to worry that those kids will be punished, not to ensure that they will.

The kids in the lower right quadrant, the passively independent-minded, are the dreamy ones. They don't care much about rules and probably aren't 100% sure what the rules even are.

And the kids in the upper right quadrant, the aggressively independent-minded, are the naughty ones. When they see a rule, their first impulse is to question it. Merely being told what to do makes them inclined to do the opposite."

When they become adults, the groups begin to materialize as such:

"The call of the aggressively conventional-minded is "Crush <outgroup>!" ... The call of the passively conventional-minded is "What will the neighbors think?" The call of the passively independent-minded is "To each his own." And the call of the aggressively independent-minded is 'Eppur si muove.'"

III.

It's easy to picture the aggressive-conventional "tattletales" as the law-and-order, authoritarian types. While this type would be in my outgroup, I'm not worried about them because the law is tied to government and our founders built in a system of equilibrium to hold different groups in check. So while I disagree with their worldview, I don't worry about a coup.

However, there is another group that fits into this quadrant: the cancel-culture left. Rather than tattling on those who break laws, they tattle on those who break cultural taboos, like writing about transgender issues (Google "Jesse Singal" and "trans") or group IQ differences (Google "Sam Harris" "IQ" and "race") or even totally benign issues (Google "David Shor" and "Civis Analytics").

It might sound uncouth to compare social justice advocates to anti-immigration conservatives. The knee-jerk response is to say something like "after 400 years of oppression it's about time someone stands up for racial justice and punishes some rule-breakers!"

But here is the thing: according to this model, the aggressive conventionals are probably the ones who kept slavery in place. Graham writes:

"Since one's quadrant depends more on one's personality than the nature of the rules, most people would occupy the same quadrant even if they'd grown up in a quite different society.

Princeton professor Robert George recently wrote:

I sometimes ask students what their position on slavery would have been had they been white and living in the South before abolition. Guess what? They all would have been abolitionists! They all would have bravely spoken out against slavery, and worked tirelessly against it.

He's too polite to say so, but of course they wouldn't. And indeed, our default assumption should not merely be that his students would, on average, have behaved the same way people did at the time, but that the ones who are aggressively conventional-minded today would have been aggressively conventional-minded then too. In other words, that they'd not only not have fought against slavery, but that they'd have been among its staunchest defenders."

Think about John Lewis' concept of "good trouble" and the tactics of civil rights activists that included breaking rules and pushing boundaries. They were definitely aggressive-independents. Today's social justice activists are more about punishing people, with calls for arresting the cops who shot Breonna Taylor, punishing Derek Chauvin, and ending qualified immunity so we can punish the cops who broke the rules. They are definitely aggressive-conventionals. So while both groups are pursuing social justice, the types of people drawn to the cause now come from a different segment of the quadrant (independent rule breakers to conventional tattletales).

What seems to be happening is that the aggressive conventionals have captured a great deal of cultural power and there doesn't seem to be any equilibrium to push back on them when they move from the motte ("cops shouldn't get away with murder") to the bailey ("Trader Joe's is racist"). More troublesome, they have no incentive to push back on themselves, only a greater incentive to seek out further rule-breakers.

"Enforcers of orthodoxy can't allow a borderline idea to exist, because that gives other enforcers an opportunity to one-up them in the moral purity department, and perhaps even to turn enforcer upon them. So instead of getting the margin for error we need, we get the opposite: a race to the bottom in which any idea that seems at all bannable ends up being banned."

IV.

This puts me in a tough position because I agree with a lot of the ends of aggressive social justice advocates (housing reform, police reform) but I just can't go along with their means. 

After listening to a discussion of this "successor ideology", Ross Douthat predicted (1:14:13) that this movement might last about ten years before crumbling. He's probably right; if they are led by aggressive-conventionals and don't develop any type of internal structure for civil discourse, and continue to place such high value on punishing rule-breakers, they are bound to turn on one another before taking over anything.

The only faction strong enough to fight back is the Trump right, which I want no part of (Ironic that the strongest cultural groups are both aggressive conventionals; most people are passive conventional). I can join the fight when I agree, but eventually, my moral impurity will be exposed. Or I can sit back with the rest of the quadrants and watch it all burn, even if it takes ten years. 

Graham thinks the independent-minded will eventually build their own institutions to protect themselves. We're starting to see some of that with journalists leaving legacy media for Substack and independent podcasts. I'll be more impressed if academics leave higher education to start their own new institutions. 

V.

A final theory for what is happening comes from Michelle Gelfund's "Rule Makers, Rule Breakers." She describes tight and loose cultures and how perceived threats like social instability, ecological challenges, high population density, and the decline of social order lead to cultural tightening and stricter social norms.

Threat drives power to aggressive-conventionals. Trump voters perceived threat from immigrants, elites, and the global order. In response, progressives perceived threat from Trump and his constant norm-breaking. This likely explains the growth of cancel culture on the left; if they don't have political power in the White House they can at least have cultural power on Twitter.

So it's possible that we're stuck in an authoritarian feedback loop, with right and left aggressive conventionals pushing back on one another (and even some ingroup fighting on the left) and leaving less and less cultural space for the independent-minded.

Gelfund says that you want to aim for a Goldilocks situation. 

"cultures that are either wildly loose or wildly tight have higher suicide rates, less happiness, more instability. The extremes are really bad and the internet is a context that has gotten extreme, so we half to give up some of that freedom for some order, and it’s a principle that we have to negotiate."

In all likelihood, our society is just going through a "tight" culture phase that will loosen on its own, as it always does.