October 23, 2022 SA: Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences Luke Ford No sacred cows.

SA: Conservative and Liberal Brains Might Have Some Real Differences

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Luke Ford

From Scientific American, Oct. 26, 2020:

* …conservatives desire security, predictability and authority more than liberals do, and liberals are more comfortable with novelty, nuance and complexity.
* Understanding the influence of partisanship on identity, even down to the level of neurons, “helps to explain why people place party loyalty over policy, and even over truth,” argued psychologists Jay Van Bavel and Andrea Pereira, both then at New York University, in Trends in Cognitive Sciences in 2018. In short, we derive our identities from both our individual characteristics, such as being a parent, and our group memberships, such as being a New Yorker or an American. These affiliations serve multiple social goals: they feed our need to belong and desire for closure and predictability, and they endorse our moral values. And our brain represents them much as it does other forms of social identity.
Among other things, partisan identity clouds memory.
* When they were shown a video of a political protest in a 2012 study, liberals and conservatives were more or less likely to favor calling police depending on their interpretation of the protest’s goal. If the objective was liberal (opposing the military barring openly gay people from service), the conservatives were more likely to want the cops. The opposite was true when participants thought it was a conservative protest (opposing an abortion clinic). The more strongly we identify with a party, the more likely we are to double down on our support for it. That tendency is exacerbated by rampant political misinformation and, too often, identity wins out over accuracy.

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NYT: They Legitimized the Myth of a Stolen Election — and Reaped the Rewards

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Luke Ford

During the first couple of months of 2021, Donald Trump’s ridiculous claims about voter fraud were effectively re-interpreted as protests against unconstitutional procedures and this allowed any Republican to sign on to a campaign for “election integrity” even though there is no evidence that voter fraud is a major problem in America.

From the New York Times, Oct. 3, 2022:

While most House Republicans had amplified Mr. Trump’s claims about the election in the aftermath of his loss, only the right flank of the caucus continued to loudly echo Mr. Trump’s fraud allegations in the days before Jan. 6, The Times found. More Republican lawmakers appeared to seek a way to placate Mr. Trump and his supporters without formally endorsing his extraordinary allegations. In formal statements justifying their votes, about three-quarters relied on the arguments of a low-profile Louisiana congressman, Representative Mike Johnson, the most important architect of the Electoral College objections.
On the eve of the Jan. 6 votes, he presented colleagues with what he called a “third option.” He faulted the way some states had changed voting procedures during the pandemic, saying it was unconstitutional, without supporting the outlandish claims of Mr. Trump’s most vocal supporters. His Republican critics called it a Trojan horse that allowed lawmakers to vote with the president while hiding behind a more defensible case.
Even lawmakers who had been among the noisiest “stop the steal” firebrands took refuge in Mr. Johnson’s narrow and lawyerly claims, though his nuanced argument was lost on the mob storming the Capitol, and over time it was the vision of the rioters — that a Democratic conspiracy had defrauded America — that prevailed in many Republican circles.
That has made objecting politically profitable. Republican partisans have rewarded objectors with grass-roots support, paths to higher office and campaign money. Corporate backers have reopened their coffers to lawmakers they once denounced as threats to democracy. And almost all the objectors seeking re-election are now poised to return to Congress next year, when Republicans are expected to hold a majority in the House.
Objectors are set to fill the Republican leadership posts and head a majority of the committees. All eight Republicans in the House seeking higher office voted against the Electoral College tally, while a dozen Republican lawmakers who broke with Mr. Trump have either lost primaries or chosen to retire.
Playing to Trump loyalists, many across the party have made a slogan of “election integrity” — a “dog whistle” perpetuating the erroneous belief that Mr. Trump’s victory was stolen, as one dissenting Republican put it in a party meeting. More than a third of the objectors joined a new Election Integrity Caucus, which advocates stricter voter requirements and has featured speakers who supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to fight his loss.

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Process (Liberals) Vs Ends (Conservatives)

Posted on October 22, 2022 by Luke Ford

From a realist (ala John Mearsheimer perspective), the primary purpose of a nation-state is to survive. This sounds ends-oriented rather than process-oriented.

From the perspective of Jewish law, a Jew may violate any Jewish law but three to survive. This sounds ends-oriented.

The more nationalist your country, the more ends-oriented it will be. The more liberal your country, the more diverse your country, the more process-oriented it will be.

In Judaism, there is a dispute about the possible existence of extra-halachic (Jewish law) morality. Is there a plane of morality above Jewish law or is right and wrong simply determined by observance of God’s law?

Is there a right – left difference with regard to means and ends? Or is this more of a mainstream vs extremist difference where the mainstreamers are more process-oriented and the extremists more ends-oriented?

The chant “No justice, no peace” is not process-oriented. It is ends-oriented. Unless you give us the ends we want, we won’t allow you peace. Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Oath Keepers and Proud Boys don’t seem terribly hamstrung by concerns about process.

Liberalism (as opposed to Leftism) seems to put process as the highest value. For example, the 2020 election was valid from a liberal perspective because it followed legal processes and all challenges were rejected by the system (including the courts). On the other hand, conservatives see a corrupt process to change voting laws by fiat (people like Mark Zuckerberg lavishly funding attempts to make voting easier for Democratic voters) carried out by liberals who control every major institution in this country (with the partial exception of the military and business) and these changes were generally not voted on by legislatures.

A philosopher tells me:

There is a thing called procedural liberalism, which was a Left thing in California, when the Left controlled the courts. But usually it is thought of differently in Michael Oakeshott, for example, the distinction is between ends-oriented and rules-oriented regimes. Same with Max Weber, where it is procedural vs substantive justice, which is associated with socialism. And Common Good people nowadays are on the Left — but not necessarily so in the past.
I think the constitution and constitutionalism in the US has generally focused on the idea that we are a rules-based order, and against the idea of a common good, which is usually used to attack constitutionalism. So, yes, to provide for ourselves vs common good provision is a rules-based model.
It is interesting that the German Basic law which is much more collectivist assigns legal status to political parties to “participate in the formation of the will of the people” (Article 21(1)). That seems pretty substantive rather than procedural.
Common good thinking is a Catholic thing. Adrian Vermuele is hot for administrative discretion.

Are conservatives more likely to argue that sometimes the ends justify the means?

Populism is not process-oriented, right? The Philosopher corrects me: “In the original forms it was process oriented and constitutionalist, but there was a difference between southern populists, who were constitutionalists, and northern ones, who were less so. The Schmittians in the US, at Harvard, ridiculed the naive faith in the constitution of conservatism in favor of discretionary power by bureaucrats.”

Trumpism is not process-focused. Michael Anton is not process-focused.

The more individualist the society, the more process-oriented it must be. The more fractured the society, the more process-focused it must be to function.

Normally in American history, the argument that the system was corrupt came from the left, and if the system is corrupt, then you have to aim for higher changes than process. Now the argument that the system is corrupt seems to come primarily from the right.

The more strongly you argue that there’s something rotten in the system, the less likely you are to place process as the highest good.

What is the purpose of the United States from a liberal perspective? To decrease oppression and ignorance and to allow for ever more human flourishing by following the processes established by our leading institutions (courts, professions, bureaucracies, education, media).

Does America have a greater purpose than just following process?

The Preamble to the United States Constitution states: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Usually following legal processes will be the most effective way to provide for the common defense and to promote the general welfare, but not always, and I think conservatives and radicals of all types are more at ease with the need for states of exception.

I wonder if the idea that the United States is here primarily to provide for ourselves and for our posterity is more of a conservative thing? For conservatives, America is not an idea nor an experiment. It is our way of protecting ourselves and our posterity from a dangerous world. Our safety is more important than following procedures. The Constitution is not a death warrant. According to Wikipedia:

[Harvard law professor Adrian] Vermuele’s concept of common-good constitutionalism is: based on the principles that government helps direct persons, associations, and society generally toward the common good, and that strong rule in the interest of attaining the common good is entirely legitimate. … This approach should take as its starting point substantive moral principles that conduce to the common good, principles that officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges) should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of the written Constitution. These principles include respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality –indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.
Vermeule specified that common-good constitutionalism is “not tethered to particular written instruments of civil law or the will of the legislators who created them.” However, the determination of the common good made by the legislators is instrumental insofar as it embodies the background principles of the natural law.[14] In other words, while the legislative intent is not per se controlling, positive law always seeks to put into effect natural law principles, and the intended principles behind the positive law are controlling. In that vein, he also says that “officials (including, but by no means limited to, judges)” will need “a candid willingness to ‘legislate morality'” in order to create a “just and well-ordered society.”
The main aim of common-good constitutionalism is certainly not to maximize individual autonomy or to minimize the abuse of power (an incoherent goal in any event), but instead to ensure that the ruler has the power needed to rule well … Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects’ own perceptions of what is best for them — perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.

It seems like there are many things more important to Vermeule than process.

I love my family, my friends and my community. There are a lot of things more important to me than process. The Enemy is he who threatens the people I love.

In his great book Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: The Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* Conservatives are intuiting precisely this molding when they claim cultural oppression. Hence their powerful sense that there is something unnatural or inauthentic about liberalism. This conviction may not always be communicated persuasively, but it nonetheless tracks the historical process by which the modern liberal identity was actually shaped. Today’s “cultural wars,” I argue, are most profoundly viewed as a contemporary recapitulation of the struggles by which the modern first emerged out of the pre-modern, a clash between elites trying to inculcate the disciplines and repressions of the modern identity and the unwashed masses trying to resist this extirpation of their traditional, often disordered folkways—a role now filled by “traditional American values.” If conservatives can feel culturally oppressed by power-hungry, control-obsessed liberals where the latter see only right-wing rhetoric, the reason is that, having less fully internalized the modern ideal of the self, conservatives are more viscerally attuned to its cultural contingency and more averse to the particular forms of disciplined, disengaged agency into which liberals have been more successfully socialized. Contemporary liberalism represents the apex of the disciplinary impulses that spawned modernity. It is the latest and most extreme outgrowth of the secularization of religious asceticism and the democratization of courtly sociability, the now forgotten pre-Enlightenment roots of progressive sensibilities. What liberals celebrate as their superior “civility” is a modernized and politicized variant of these supposedly superseded impulses. And it is these impulses that fuel liberals’ reflexive aversion to conservativism as a kind of rude and crude animality, a sinful indiscipline and affront to the higher refinement of liberal sensibilities.
* Liberals’ position at the vanguard of the modern West’s “civilizing” process necessarily thrusts them into the role of disciplinarians, in reaction to which conservatives have cultivated their own special kind of emancipationist ethos. Conservatives could have absorbed the moral and intellectual reflexes of the Left, developing a post-modernism and multiculturalism of the Right, because they are the targets of the same “civilizing” norms which the Left protests have been imperiously foisted upon non-Western peoples by a condescending European colonialism. Hence the “very focused form of snobbery” which the National Review discerns in the Left and its kulturkampf against gun enthusiasts.
* For the “adversarial attitudes” held by most intellectuals toward the beliefs and traditions of their fellow citizens are none other than the buffered distance, none other than the “historicized self-awareness” that posits itself in opposition to the “less fortunate peoples” of a barbarian past. If public policymaking cannot be permitted to fall into the hands of the American people, this is because the American people refuse the buffered distance, because they are too mired in their unreflective folkways and too indulgent of their embodied religious feelings to accede to the civilizing process that liberals would impose upon them.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy contains this entry on Carl Schmitt:

If all those who live together as legally recognized citizens of a constituted democratic state happen to distinguish between friend and enemy in exactly the same way, the equal participation of all citizens in the political process and the electoral appointment of officials would indeed be a requirement of democratic political justice. It would be possible, moreover, to identify the outcomes of the political process with the will of the people, and to consider them democratically legitimate, even if some citizens find themselves in a temporary minority. But the reason why it has become possible to identify the outcomes of democratic procedure with the will of the people is not to be sought in inherent virtues of democratic procedure itself. Rather, the identification is possible only in virtue of the prior identity of all citizens as members of a group constituted by a shared friend-enemy distinction (CPD 10–14; LL 27–28). If, contrary to our initial assumption, those who live together as legally recognized citizens of a constituted democratic state do not share a political identity in Schmitt’s sense, the identity of the rulers with all the ruled will no longer obtain, and the constituted democratic state will no longer be truly democratic. The rule of the majority will degenerate into an illegitimate form of indirect rule of one social faction over another (HV 73–91; LL 17–36; L 65–77). Sovereign dictatorship, then, is still necessary to create the substantive equality that grounds the legitimate operation of constituted, rule-governed democratic politics.

Stephen Turner writes in his 2015 book The Politics of Expertise:

* Science as a whole rests on a vast amount of what is called output legitimacy as distinct from process legitimacy. Science is legitimated by the fact that it allows us to produce valuable results. Democracy rests on process legitimacy; the question of legitimacy is whether the rules of the process were followed.
* …much of what we “know” we have accepted because we think there is a system that assures that what we take to be fact is vetted or filtered through some sort of institutional process that minimizes error or corrects for it.
* Just as science operates with an idea of truth that can become discrepant from the products of its institutional processes, so can political or religious communities face conflicts between their “truths” and the truths produced by their institutional processes…

Carl Schmitt’s Wikipedia entry states:

He saw the office of the president as a comparatively effective element, because of the power granted to the president to declare a state of exception (Ausnahmezustand). This power, which Schmitt discussed and implicitly praised as dictatorial,[27] was more in line with the underlying mentality of executive power than the comparatively slow and ineffective processes of legislative power reached through parliamentary discussion and compromise.
Schmitt was at pains to remove what he saw as a taboo surrounding the concept of “dictatorship” and to show that the concept is implicit whenever power is wielded by means other than the slow processes of parliamentary politics and the bureaucracy:
If the constitution of a state is democratic, then every exceptional negation of democratic principles, every exercise of state power independent of the approval of the majority, can be called dictatorship.[35]
For Schmitt, every government capable of decisive action must include a dictatorial element within its constitution.

Two famous law professors write about America’s constitutional dictatorship:

…emergency power, the ability to act decisively in a crisis, is not actually concentrated in the person of the President. Rather, it is distributed among different executive and national security agencies, and much of what the government does in emergency situations is done in secret. As a result, there is a long-term trend of disconnection between the plebiscitarian presidency, with its cult of personality and identification of value and action with a single individual, and the actual practices of constitutional dictatorship, which distribute decisionmaking among many comparatively faceless and anonymous institutions and individuals. The result of these two opposed elements of the modern American presidency is the schizophrenic nature of American constitutional dictatorship. Distributed expertise and secrecy on the inside combine with a plebiscitarian cult of personality on the outside. As a result, the outward manifestation of American power increasingly has little to do with the actual processes of government.

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Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK

Posted on October 22, 2022 by Luke Ford

Simon Kuper writes this 2022 book:

* Britain does have world-class scientists, engineers and quants, but they are stuck in the engine room while the rhetoricians drive the train. Modern Oxford has specialised in producing the politicians and civil servants who administrate the British state, the lawyers and accountants who service the economy, and the pundits who narrate the show. These people (and I’m one of them) typically dropped science and maths at school aged sixteen, and acquired only a smattering of economics. In parliament in 2016, MP s who had studied politics at university outnumbered those who had studied engineering nearly sevenfold.

Numbers have historically been a challenge for Britain’s Britain’s ruling class. Douglas-Home as prime minister admitted to using matchsticks to work out the consequences of the Budget. 11 Later British leaders struggled to judge scientific advice on nuclear energy, climate change and Covid-19. In 2010, George Osborne became chancellor with no formal post-school education in economics or business beyond whatever he had picked up in his Oxford history degree. By the late 2010s, Oxford’s most oversubscribed undergraduate degree was economics and management, 12 but during Osborne’s student days it didn’t yet exist.
Oxford’s dominant technocratic degree at the time was PPE: philosophy, politics, economics. Any three-year undergraduate degree is only going to skate the surface, but that was triply true of PPE, which spread the student’s time across three subjects (although most people dropped one after the first year). A PPEist of my day told me, ‘I went on to work in the Treasury but could never use the economics part of my degree as it wasn’t good enough.’
Since the referendum of 2016, it has become commonplace to associate Brexit with PPE. Ivan Rogers, for instance, a grammar-school boy who read history at Oxford, and the UK’s permanent representative to the EU until he resigned in 2017, discerned in Brexit ‘a very British establishment sort of revolution. No plan and little planning, oodles of PPE tutorial level plausible bullshit, supreme self confidence that we understand others’ real interests better than they do …’ But this is a misdiagnosis. In fact, in the 2016 referendum, 95 per cent of MPs who had studied PPE voted Remain. 13 They included Cameron, Jeremy Hunt, Philip Hammond, William Hague, Matt Hancock, Liz Truss, Rory Stewart, Sam Gyimah, Damian Hinds, Nick Boles, the Milibands, Ed Balls, Yvette Cooper and Peter Mandelson. Most of these people were modernisers at heart, who had presumably chosen the degree in search of the cutting-edge knowledge needed to run a serious country. Among the rare PPEists to back Leave were Rishi Sunak, and, more consequentially, Rupert Murdoch, who in 1950s Oxford had been business manager of Cherwell . (Murdoch had also stood for secretary of the Labour Club, 14 but was disbarred from holding office after an investigation into electoral malpractice conducted by the young Gerald Kaufman.) 15
By contrast, all the leading Oxford Tory Brexiteers studied backward-looking subjects: classics for Johnson, history for Rees-Mogg and Hannan, and ancient and modern history for Cummings. Gove’s degree was English, which mostly meant the canon.
The most Brexity degree among MPs in 2016 was classics: six of the eight classicists in the Commons voted Leave. 16 Classics was a particularly public-school course, because so few state schools offered Latin and Greek. Rachel Johnson, who read classics at Oxford one year below her brother Boris, recites a few lines of Latin, then reflects: ‘All these things we had to learn by rote, so they stuck in the head, and you got into Oxford.’ 17 By the time their brother Leo arrived, there were three Johnson siblings reading classics at Oxford simultaneously. Their brother Jo arrived in 1991 but did history.

* in 1981, two years before Boris Johnson started his degree, Oxford admitted three-quarters of pupils who applied to study classics. 18 Yet perversely, classics carried outsized prestige. Such was the status of Latin that it had been part of the admissions requirement for Oxford and Cambridge until 1960. 19 Francis Crick, who could never be bothered to learn the language, failed his entry exams for both universities. He went to University College London instead, 20 before codiscovering the structure of DNA.
In the gentlemanly Oxbridge tradition, the less useful your degree, the more chic it was. As the poet Louis Mac-Neice noted,
Not everyone here having had
The privilege of learning a language
That is incontrovertibly dead. 21
Precisely because Latin and Greek were taught chiefly at public schools, both languages became ruling-class markers – as Johnson knows when he recites from the Iliad in public. (While mayor of London, he enlisted his former Oxford tutor Jasper Griffin to provide classical passages for his speeches.) 22 Rees-Mogg later said he regretted not having studied classics at university: ‘All the really clever people do that.’ 23
‘The classics fulfilled the same sociological function in Victorian England as calligraphy in ancient China – a device to regulate and limit entry into a governing elite’, explained the historian Colin Shrosbree.

* The dominant personality in the history faculty in 1980s Oxford was Norman Stone. His reputation as an unabashed groper 28 didn’t stop him being appointed to the university university chair in 1985. Stone was a fantastically entertaining lecturer: at 9 a.m., gripping his lectern in both hands to stop himself falling over from drink, he could ad lib about European history in a Glaswegian accent, without notes, non-stop for an hour.

* he exercised a fatal attraction for historically minded young Tories. Dominic Cummings reportedly approached him after a lecture to complain that his own tutor was always telling him to ignore the role of individual decision-makers like Hitler. Stone agreed that this was insane, and said, ‘Boy, I’ll teach you myself,’ which he did. The two men developed a mutual fascination.
Another of Stone’s protégés, Hannan, would write of his memorial service in 2019:
“I was able to take my place in St Martin-in-the-Fields among hundreds of (for want of a better shorthand) conservative intellectuals. There were dozens of Tory peers and MPs, scores of distinguished writers and academics and a good number of those anti-communist Mittel-European thinkers who, in many ways, made up Norman’s hinterland. Arriving just in time from the European Parliament, I found myself between Peter Lilley and Alan Sked, the LSE historian who founded the Anti-Federalist League in 1991, changing its name to UKIP in 1993. Dominic Cummings ambled in a little late wearing what looked like a black gilet for the occasion. Michael Gove and Andrew Roberts were among those who gave readings. You get the picture: here was the tribe massing to mourn one of its own.”

* Perhaps no other country has as happy a relationship with its own history. And the self-appointed guardian of this relationship is the Conservative Party. The Tory public schoolboys grew up as ancestor-worshippers, and understandably so: for anyone able to gloss over the brutality of Empire, the achievements of their tiny caste were breathtaking. Between about 1860 and 1960, British men who had attended either independent schools or Oxbridge or both had invented, ruled and written much of the modern world. They had governed a quarter of the planet, and overseen victory in two world wars. They created Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, Winnie-the-Pooh, Bertie Wooster, James Bond, The Jungle Book and Nineteen Eighty-Four. They had spilt the atom and discovered evolution, television, penicillin and the structure of DNA. They helped invent the computer and the nuclear bomb. 37 They gave the world Keynesianism and most modern sports. Recall Boris Johnson’s camp British-exceptionalist speech as mayor of London at the end of the Beijing Olympics:
“Virtually every single one of our international sports were either invented or codified by the British, and I say this respectfully to our Chinese hosts who have excelled so magnificently at ping pong. Ping pong was invented on the dining tables of England in the nineteenth century and it was called wiff waff. There I think you have the essential difference between us and the rest of world. Other nations, the French, looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to have dinner. We looked at a dining table and saw an opportunity to play wiff waff.”

* I once found myself up a mountain in the Alps writing about a group of British toffs who went skiing every winter in 1920s outfits. As I scribbled in my notebook, a female toff peered over my shoulder and drawled, ‘Oh, are you writing shorthand? My great-great-grandfather invented shorthand.’ ‘What was your great-great-grandfather called?’ I asked. ‘Pitman,’ she said. I was writing Pitman shorthand.

After all that, if you were born into the ruling caste in the 1960s or 1970s, modernity could only feel like decline. Your fathers and grandfathers had run the world, and here you were, growing up in a struggling mid-sized outpost of the European Economic Community. The UK’s tame, vegetarian, low-stakes, Brussels-based, post-imperial incarnation had nothing more glorious to offer than the Falklands War.

* When I asked Dan Hannan why so many of today’s politicians were at Oxford, he replied, ‘It’s been true forever, right? … I guess people who were very interested in politics were more likely to apply to Oxford, because they think there’s more going on there.’ By contrast, the Cambridge Union has never produced a British prime minister. An attendee at one of its recent reunions reports ‘a room full of failed ambition and putting a hearty face on’.

* Politicos at Oxford formed a tight-knit little universe. In 1976, Theresa Brasier and her future husband Philip May, both of them Union ‘hacks’, were introduced at a disco of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) by another Union president, Benazir Bhutto, then already preparing to be prime minister of Pakistan.

* The future Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull met both his future counterparts Brasier and Bhutto at the Union, the first time in 1977 when he came to town as a visiting debater, and ended up giving Bhutto a lift back to London. ‘I have to say I’ve never known anyone drape themselves across the back seat of a Mini Minor as elegantly as she did.’
A year later Turnbull returned to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. [Michael] Crick found him ‘the most dynamic person I ever met at Oxford, or since really’.
What was Turnbull’s impression of Oxford? “It was the first place that anyone asked me essentially, ‘What does your father do?’ People actually were hung up on how they spoke, their social background, where they went to school and so forth.”

* Like his role model Churchill, Boris Johnson spent years mastering the ancient craft of public speaking. 2 Eton had offered unmatched opportunities to practise. Johnson ran the school’s Debating Society, and by the time he left was so well-versed in traditional speech-making that he could perform it as parody.

* Johnson learned at school to defeat opponents whose arguments were better simply by ignoring their arguments. He discovered how to win elections and debates not by boring the audience with detail, but with carefully timed jokes, calculated lowerings of voice, and ad hominem jibes.

* Ignorant and suspicious of philosophy, Oxford politicos instinctively mock the funny-sounding new-fangled utopian ideologies that have sometimes ensnared French or German elites. Marxism, with its strangled terminology, never stood a chance in Britain. Oxford in particular was too ironic for radicalism. Kingsley Amis, one of the few post-war undergraduates to join the university’s branch of the Communist Party, explained later: ‘At least … it involved girls, not very nice looking ones, though.’ 30 The British emphasis on witty, deflating rhetoric was itself a bulwark against dangerous ideas. George Steiner, the continental intellectual-turned-Cambridge don, diagnosed:
“If the Lord God came to England and started expounding his beliefs, you know what they’d say? They’d say, ‘Oh, come off it!’ Yes, this land is blessed with a powerful mediocrity of mind. It has saved you from communism and it has saved you from fascism. In the end you don’t care enough about ideas to suffer their consequences.”

* I’d had a wonderful time at Oxford, but I left feeling both psychologically and intellectually unprepared for adulthood. I was painfully aware that I had been undereducated. In the Netherlands, where I had grown up, pupils sitting the final high-school exams aged eighteen did seven or eight subjects. In Britain, I’d sat four A-levels, meaning that my knowledge of all other academic fields was adolescent at best. As Rosa Ehrenreich notes: ‘Oxford produces scientists who haven’t read a work of literature since they were fifteen, language students who know nothing of history, law students who know nothing of politics.’ 2
The classic British three-year undergraduate degree is one of the shortest in the western world as it is, but my time at Oxford had amounted to just seventy-two term-time weeks, or a bit under a year and a half of actual work, when I wasn’t drinking with other wasters in the college bar.

* I went to Harvard to study economics, politics and Russian for a year, and ended up delving into mysteries I had never previously contemplated, such as how exchange rates worked.
The combined workload for the various classes at Harvard was much bigger than at Oxford – total reading assignments alone routinely exceeded 1,000 pages a week…

* Other British scholars returned home from Harvard with the latest in centre-left policy thinking, which they helped deliver to a grateful Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, then busy remaking the Labour Party. Several New Labour ideas – such as the New Deal for the long-term unemployed, or Sure Start, the programme for toddlers – had American intellectual origins.

The Oxford Tories didn’t bother with graduate school. As per public-school tradition, they seemed to feel that Oxford had completed their formal education.

* Malcolm Turnbull remarks: ‘Apart from city-states, I can’t think of another country which is so dominated by its capital as the UK is. Its institutions are national.’

* When I asked [Daniel] Hannan why a group of people who could have chosen any career flocked to Grub Street, he replied: ‘I’d always wanted to write columns. At the time that I applied for the Telegraph, I just thought that was what I was going to do for the rest of my life.’ Rachel Johnson, who started her career at the Financial Times, observes that becoming a journalist, especially a columnist, allowed ‘a kind of projection of personality that going into a merchant bank or a management consultancy didn’t offer. It was the beginning of the cult of personality and of the development of your individual brand.’

* The Oxford Tories belonged in journalism. Opinion-writing was exactly what their education had prepared them for. The right-wing Spectator magazine became their London clubhouse. The American journalist Anne Applebaum, who worked for the Spectator from 1992 to 1996, recalled: ‘The tone of every conversation, every editorial meeting, was arch, every professional conversation amusing; there was no moment when the joke ended or the irony ceased.’ 2 In 1999, Johnson became editor of the magazine.
By this time, he had transferred his Oxford Union persona to the TV screen, starring in the show Have I Got News For You . His style turned out to work on a national stage. Ian Buruma writes,
“Johnson deliberately exaggerated the upper-class mannerisms he acquired at Eton and Oxford: the stammering drawl, the self-deprecating jocularity that can only come from a deep reservoir of assumed superiority, the cultivated amateurishness, the Latin quotations, the carefully studied slovenly dress … Johnson realised that playing down his upper-class education would only make him look shifty, and so he played it up.”

* Life was good at the Spectator . And yet Johnson was preparing the leap into the senior branch of the rhetorical sector: parliament. As he explained, ‘They don’t put up statues to journalists.’

* Cameron hadn’t simply been thrust by his fellow MPs on a grumpy public. Rather, he emerged from Eton and Oxford branded – in his own mind and those of his voters – as a ‘leader’. A profile in the FT called him ‘a man whose most visceral political belief is that he is the best person to run the country’. 16
Eton and Oxford were electoral assets to Cameron more than they were weaknesses. Rachel Johnson says, ‘You just looked at him and thought, “That is a prime minister”. He inhabited the role so easily.’ Much of the public certainly liked that. It’s noticeable that the only three postwar British prime ministers without an elite educational institution to their name – Callaghan, Major and Gordon Brown – didn’t exude ease in office.

* Club members have traditionally been discouraged from holding strong fixed beliefs. The basic ideology has always been: trust in the system. After all, the system is run by chaps like them, who were at college a couple of minutes’ walk from each other. Unlike countries with multiple power centres like the US or Germany or Italy, the UK has a single ruling class.
‘You get a homogeneity in your elite that you don’t get in larger nations,’ remarks Malcolm Turnbull. He adds that even Australia, with a population less than 40 per cent the size of Britain’s, is ‘a much more diverse country in terms of people’s perspectives and attitudes and where they’d been educated, where they went to school, where they grew up.’
Because Britain has no recent traumas of revolution, civil war or collaboration, establishment members traditionally treat each other as good chaps even when they disagree on matters of life and death. In Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time , there’s a dinner party that takes place just after Chamberlain’s return from Munich. Powell, an Eton-and-Oxford man who knew half the establishment, describes two Conservative MPs on opposite sides of the appeasement debate behaving towards each other with impeccable politeness. They ‘had evidently no wish for argument’, writes Powell. 3 That’s the British establishment. Even the rupture of Munich soon healed, as did the rupture of Thatcherism once New Labour accepted her legacy of privatisation, lower taxes and higher inequality.
By the Cameron years, Britain was once again run by a group of politicians, civil servants, business people and financiers who agreed on most things. The right and left wings of the establishment got along fine. This was not America.

* The ruling caste could accommodate almost anybody. Even ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols, the ultimate anti-establishment song, was played at the Olympic opening ceremony in 2012, the happiest moment of Cameron’s tenure.

* In the Britain of Blair and Cameron, almost all establishment members shared the same set of facts and, to a large degree, even opinions, which they absorbed every morning from Radio Four’s Today programme. Almost all had come to accept Britain’s place inside the EU but outside its main projects: the euro, Schengen and ever-closer political union. Almost all agreed that social inequality and climate change were big problems, and also agreed not to do anything much about them.

* Brexit has been billed as an anti-elitist revolt. More precisely, it was an anti-elitist revolt led by an elite: a coup by one set of Oxford public schoolboys against other, backed by an Australian Oxford public schoolboy media magnate masquerading as an anti-elitist. Indeed, many voters were willing to entrust Vote Leave with the national future precisely because it was led by an elite.

* Johnson’s high verbal intelligence had absolved him from ever developing his analytical intelligence. Concentrated thought could always be sidestepped with a joke. He and his fellow Brexiteers were so poorly briefed that in December 2017 they accepted the principle of Brussels’ ‘backstop’ plan to keep the Irish land border open, before spending much of the next few years fighting their own decision. The Brexiteers failed to debate Brussels into submission, because the EU’s negotiators were lawyers who followed rules. Cummings said later that when Johnson struck the Withdrawal Agreement with the EU in 2019, ‘he never had a scoobydoo what the deal he signed meant’. 5 It scarcely mattered anyway: in the Oxford tradition, witty and brilliant speeches trumped reality.

* His caste instinctively scorned constraints. Had he still been a Telegraph columnist, he would surely have been warning the prime minister against imprisoning the nation over a flu. In his absence, that role was taken by other 1980s Oxford Tory journalists such as Toby Young, Julia Hartley-Brewer and James Delingpole. Their lack of scientific training did not impact their intellectual confidence. ‘When we have herd immunity Boris will face a reckoning on this pointless and damaging lockdown,’ was the headline on Young’s Telegraph column in July 2020. 9 Six months later, after well over 100,000 deaths, Young’s Lockdown Sceptics website still had a section headed ‘Where’s the pandemic?’, which said that ‘cases are just positive tests’. 10
Young, Hartley-Brewer and Delingpole had inherited the role that Hannan, Gove and Johnson himself played over Brexit: a vanguard of skilled wordsmiths can equip the Torysphere with an entertaining and persuasive story, wrapped in Oxford-tutorial level plausibility, larded with quips and choice statistics and appeals to ancient English traditions of liberty, Burke and all that. Boring experts might dissect the message with unmemorable phrases, but they didn’t get much of a hearing in the Torysphere. The ‘sceptics’ as much as the scientists were a voice in Johnson’s ear.

* [Covid] was the British state’s fourth major policy blunder in less than twenty years, after the Iraq war, the financial crisis and Brexit. Like the previous disasters, and like Johnson’s premiership itself, it had its roots partly in the privileging of rhetoric over facts or expertise.
In 2002/3, it had been Tony Blair’s articulacy that sold the Iraq war in Britain. When he hinted that Saddam Hussein’s imaginary ‘weapons of mass destruction’ could hit the UK, 19 the ruling class mostly believed him. Educated Americans would often praise Blair for arguing the case more eloquently than President Bush could. Yes: Blair spoke well. That was what he did. Where there were gaps in his knowledge, he talked around them.

* Malcolm Turnbull, surveying Britain in late 2020 from the safety of Australia, remarked: ‘The handling of Covid in the UK, I guess, is an example of not handling administration competently or effectively. The once-over lightly, debating chamber style – well, you can skate along for quite a long time, but then you end up with very serious consequences.’

* Most tutors today don’t tolerate articulate bluffers. There is even some soul-searching over Oxford’s role in shaping the Brexiteers. Louise Richardson, the university’s vice-chancellor, has said that she was ‘embarrassed to confess we educated’ Michael Gove. 6
Final exams have been reformed to favour scholars over ‘natural essayists’, a history tutor told me. Partly driven by the gender gap in results – confident men being rewarded for bold counterintuitive arguments made in a hurry – the format of three essays in a three-hour exam, with multiple such tests in a week or so at the end of the third year, is in decline. Now the history degree gives more weight to a compulsory 12,000-word thesis, a ‘Special Subject Extended Essay’, and a take-home paper at the end of the second year in which students have a week to write three essays.
Covid-19 prompted another reform: after exams were scrapped, history students had to submit revised, improved and footnoted versions of their three best term-time essays. In the 1980s, footnotes on undergraduate essays were almost unheard of.

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People Never Say What They Mean (10-21-22)

Posted on October 21, 2022 by Luke Ford

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Kanye West and the Rise of Christian Nationalism (10-20-22)

Posted on October 20, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:45 The rise of Kari Lake
15:00 Elliott Blatt joins
17:00 Kino Casino in shambles
18:30 Is Ethan Ralph self-harming?
20:00 Ex-cons turning their lives around
21:00 Prisons are racist
26:00 Dopamine Nation
41:00 Richard Spencer’s strange new respectability
52:00 PPP turns on Andy Warski for abusing cocaine
58:00 43 anti-white commercials
1:04:00 Dr Merve Emre – The Impersonal Essay
1:10:00 Merve Emre: The Illusion of the First Person
1:41:00 NYT: Burned Out on Your Personal Brand

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Kanye West is not a Political Philosopher (10-19-22)

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 Tucker Carlson warns about a Hutus vs Tutsis scenario in America where all ills are blamed on one racial group
02:00 MSNBC hates white people
08:00 Is the NFL racist?
11:00 Is the NHL too white?
13:00 Why is Comcast ok with hatred of whites?
20:00 Richard Spencer critiques Kanye
26:00 Reb Dooovid joins
51:00 Gatekeeper archetypes
56:40 Mafia expert Scott Burnstein
57:30 Joining Orthodox Judaism is like joining the mob
1:12:00 Dooovid’s 13 books that changed his life
1:29:00 Jim Goad says Tucker Carlson like Richard Spencer except for Richard being an atheist
1:31:30 David Frum talks to Richard Spencer
1:51:00 Should Russia keep Crimea?
1:52:00 Ian Bremmer of the Eurasia Group

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HATE: Why We Should Resist it With Free Speech, Not Censorship

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

Nadine Strossen writes in this 2018 book:

* Despite the varying definitions that have been adopted and proposed in “hate speech” laws, they all share two fundamental First Amendment flaws: they violate the cardinal viewpoint neutrality and emergency principles by permitting government to suppress speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared, and not because it directly causes imminent serious harm. Empowering government to choose the words and ideas we may not utter or listen to for these reasons stifles our freedom of thought, which is the essence of individual autonomy, and also an essential building block for democratic self-government.
Moreover, “hate speech” laws also share a third basic First Amendment flaw, which flows from the first two: they are unduly vague and impermissibly overbroad, thus necessitating enforcement according to the subjective standards of complainants and enforcing authorities. While “hate speech” laws can be drafted with differing degrees of precision and breadth, they all center on concepts that call for subjective judgments, starting with the very concept of “hate” itself. Because these laws do not comply with the emergency or viewpoint neutrality principles, they lack the constraints that those principles impose on government discretion. Once government is authorized to suppress speech because of a feared harmful tendency or because of its disfavored, disturbing viewpoint, government has largely unfettered censorial power. In the United States, virtually all campus “hate speech” codes that courts have reviewed have been struck down on grounds of undue vagueness and overbreadth. Likewise, the language that has been used in other countries’ “hate speech” laws demonstrates that, despite their many differences in detail, they all license government to make discretionary, subjective judgments targeting an expansive range of speech.

* the Supreme Court steadily has reduced government’s power to punish speech solely because its message is disfavored, disturbing, or feared. Instead, government may punish speech that relates to public issues, including “hate speech,” only when it directly causes a specific, imminent, serious harm, such as inciting imminent violent or illegal conduct. These requirements curb government’s censorial power, reducing the risk that it will be wielded only or primarily to suppress unpopular ideas.
Unleashing government’s power to silence ideas that are disfavored, disturbing, or feared not only undermines liberty and democracy; it also subverts the equality goals that animate “hate speech” laws. Such laws are predictably enforced to suppress unpopular speakers and ideas, and too often they even are enforced to stifle speech of the vulnerable, marginalized minority groups they are designed to protect.
These problems follow from the premises of “hate speech” law proponents themselves. They contend that our societal institutions, including the criminal and civil justice systems, reflect entrenched racism and other types of discrimination. They also point to the implicit or unconscious biases that our culture has engrained in us. Given these realities, it is predictable that the institutions and individuals enforcing “hate speech” laws will not do so in a way that is helpful to minorities. The actual enforcement record of “hate speech” laws around the world, discussed throughout this book, demonstrates that this predictable pattern in fact has materialized, including in developed democracies.

* The leading pro-slavery advocate, Senator John C. Calhoun, argued that abolitionists who criticized slavery “libeled the South and inflicted emotional injury.” During the 1830s, many Southern states enacted laws suppressing abolitionist speech, which was feared to spur violence—in particular, slave rebellions—and indeed to threaten the nation’s very survival. Legal historian Michael Kent Curtis has observed that even many Northerners shared the widespread “assumption that abolitionist publications would lead to slave rebellions.” Likewise, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s historic letter came from a Birmingham jail because he had sought to condemn racial segregation and discrimination to audiences who hated and feared those messages.

* • In 2017, two British street preachers were convicted for preaching from the Bible, including statements that were deemed insulting to LGBT persons and Muslims. The prosecutor told the Court: “[A]‌lthough the words preached are included in a version of the Bible in 1611, this does not mean that they are not capable of amounting to a [criminal] offense in 2016.”
• In 2016, a Danish appellate court affirmed a lower court’s conviction of a man who had posted Facebook comments criticizing “[t]‌he ideology of Islam,” charging that “Islam wants to abuse democracy in order to get rid of democracy.”
• In 2016, Laure Pora, who headed the Paris chapter of the LGBT rights organization ACT-UP, was fined €2,300 for applying the term “homophobe” to Ludovine de La Rochère, the president of an organization that defends “traditional family values” and opposes same-sex marriage; ACT-UP activists had posted flyers featuring de La Rochère with the word “homophobe” over her face.
• In 2015, France’s highest court upheld criminal convictions and fines totaling $14,500 for twelve pro-Palestinian activists who went to supermarkets wearing T-shirts with the message “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” and handed out flyers that said “buying Israeli products means legitimizing crimes in Gaza.”
• In 2014, a British church was sanctioned for displaying a sign on its property showing burning flames and stating, “If you think there is no God you better be right!!”
• In 2013, a Catholic bishop in Switzerland was subject to a criminal complaint and investigation for quoting Old Testament passages about homosexuality during a debate on marriage and the family.
• In 2011, an Australian journalist and his newspaper employer were convicted because of his columns complaining that “there are fair-skinned people in Australia with essentially European ancestry . . . who, motivated by career opportunities available to Aboriginal people or by political activism, have chosen to falsely identify as Aboriginal.”
• In 2010, a Danish historian and journalist was convicted for saying during an interview that there was a high crime rate in areas with high Muslim populations.
• In 2010, Polish police criminally charged two singers because of critical statements they made about the Bible and the Catholic Church. One had said that the Bible was “unbelievable” and had been written by people “drunk on wine and smoking some kind of herbs.” The other allegedly said, during a performance, that the Catholic Church was “the most murderous cult on the planet,” and he tore up a copy of the Bible.
• In 2009, an Austrian Member of Parliament was convicted, sentenced to a prison term (which was suspended), and fined €24,000 because she said that “in today’s system” Muhammad would be considered a child molester, since his wife Aisha was believed to be around 6 or 7 years old when they were married and 9 years old when they consummated the marriage.
• In 2008, a 15-year-old British boy was charged by police and investigated by prosecutors because he displayed a sign during a peaceful demonstration reading: “Scientology is not a religion, it is a dangerous cult.”
• In 2008, the Canadian weekly magazine Maclean’s was subjected to proceedings before multiple enforcement bodies because articles it had published were allegedly Islamophobic.
• In 2008, Brigitte Bardot, French former film star and longtime animal rights activist, was convicted and fined €15,000 for writing a letter to then–Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy complaining about Muslims’ ritual slaughter of sheep and stating that Muslims are “destroying our country by imposing their ways.”
• In 2005, the French newspaper Le Monde was found guilty of inciting hatred against Jews because of a 2002 editorial that criticized certain Israeli policies while referring to Israel as “a nation of refugees.”
• In 2001, a Dutch imam was prosecuted because he said during a national TV interview that homosexual behavior was “detrimental to Dutch society” and an “infectious disease,” citing the Qu’ran and other Muslim texts.
• In 1999, Britain’s then–Home Secretary Jack Straw was subjected to a formal investigation for inciting racial hatred against the Roma because he had said that some criminal activity was carried out by people who posed as “gypsies” or “travelers.”
PRIVATE-SECTOR INSTITUTIONS SHOULD PROTECT FREE SPEECH
“[Social media] platforms—although not formally bound by the First Amendment—have a democratic obligation to embrace something close to the constitutional standard. . . . Like universities and media outlets, online speech platforms should not be safe spaces. They should be democratic spaces, with the ultimate victors in the clash of ideas determined by reason and deliberation . . .”
—George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen
“I woke up in a bad mood and decided [the Daily Stormer ] shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power. [A Cloudflare employee] asked after I told him [about this decision]: ‘Is this the day the Internet dies?’ ”
—Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare
I concur with Jeffrey Rosen and Matthew Prince that certain powerful private-sector actors, which are not directly subject to constitutional constraints because they are not part of the government, should nonetheless respect the free speech rights of others over whom they exercise power.

* online intermediaries that operate internationally must comply with laws in other countries that are less speech-protective than the United States, including “hate speech” laws. Even so, the online companies can opt for “geo-blocking,” confining the restrictive measures to the pertinent geographical territory. In short, to the maximum extent feasible, these important institutions should wield their vast power consistent with the core speech-protective viewpoint neutrality and emergency principles.

* 1. There is insufficient evidence that constitutionally protected “hate speech” (as distinguished from “hate speech” that is already punishable) materially contributes to the harms that are said to warrant its suppression.
2. Even if there were sufficient evidence that constitutionally protected “hate speech” did materially contribute to these feared harms, “hate speech” laws would not effectively reduce the feared harms.
3. Even if there were sufficient evidence that constitutionally protected “hate speech” did materially contribute to the feared harms, and even if “hate speech” laws would meaningfully reduce these feared harms, these laws should still be rejected because of the damage they would do to freedom of speech and democratic legitimacy, as well as to equality and societal harmony.

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When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2022 book:

* Central to the goal of reducing payouts was preventing policyholders from hiring lawyers, she said, because “represented” clients on average got payouts multiple times bigger than claimants who didn’t hire legal help.
“We were told that Allstate was going to change the way claims were handled so that claimants could not get lawyers,” Reed said. In other words, beat down the opposing counsel by fighting every motion in court, making it so time-consuming and expensive that lawyers would reconsider filing suit against Allstate. This was the “boxing gloves” part of the strategy.
“More people without representation would mean larger profits for the company,” she said. McKinsey was telling Allstate to turn its claims center into a profit center.
The words merit italics because what McKinsey did at Allstate fundamentally altered America’s insurance industry.

* Americans have had a love-hate relationship with insurance companies for decades. They love their local insurance agent, typically a pillar of the community, a coach for Little League baseball or Pop Warner football. But they hate dealing with insurance companies that bombard them with paperwork requests and sometimes deny what they see as legitimate claims. Until McKinsey appeared on the scene, the profession was dominated by experienced claims adjusters bound by law to offer fair claims. The “claims man” was an honorable and coveted profession in postwar America.

* McKinsey was focused on its traditional role of making businesses more efficient—cutting costs. For the claims department, that meant controlling the expense of handling claims, known in the industry as loss adjustment expense, or LAE. This could be anything from culling excess employees, cutting down mailing expenses, negotiating better prices for copier paper, or reducing overtime costs.
But tinkering around the edges, streamlining offices, and cutting expenses could get the company only so far. What insurance companies spend on claims processing is a small fraction of what they pay out in claims themselves. In 2018 the property and casualty industry paid out $365.9 billion in claims, spending $64.6 billion in processing fees, meaning insurers on average spent about 17 percent of what they paid out for administration expenses.
By the 1990s, with McKinsey-led financialization sweeping the economy and ever-increasing pressure from activist shareholders for companies to boost profits, the firm pushed a big new idea to its clients: reducing the amount paid out in claims. In McKinsey-speak: “ After years of squeezing the cost side, management recognized huge opportunities to rebalance and invested cautiously in LAE to capture indemnity savings.” The new approach to boosting profit was to curtail what insurance companies saw as unjustifiably high amounts paid out to some claimants. To control what it called “leakage.”
McKinsey was telling Allstate to essentially declare war on a sizable proportion of its policyholders. One slide proclaimed, “Winning will be a zero sum game.” In other words, Allstate’s gains come at the expense of its policyholders. Another featured an image of an alligator. Why? Because, like an alligator, Allstate would just “sit and wait” for its victim—the claimant—to give up. “The money came from the only place it could come from—the pockets of Allstate policyholders and claimants,” Berardinelli wrote.
Before McKinsey, there were still angry policyholders. Before McKinsey, insurance companies lowballed claims. But McKinsey systematized it.

* Following Allstate’s adoption of the McKinsey system, State Farm, the biggest property and casualty insurer, signed up for the same magic elixir. Its McKinsey-designed “Accelerating Claims Excellence” system was first introduced to its field offices in mid-1995. AAA followed a few years later. Liberty Mutual also became a McKinsey client.
“ It has been common knowledge within the casualty insurance industry since at least 1995 that McKinsey was openly selling the same redesign methodologies and claim handling processes it developed in the early 1990’s for State Farm and Allstate to their competitors,” Stephen Strzelec, a former manager for State Farm, said in a 2008 affidavit.
“They set a trend,” one former McKinsey partner said of the firm’s work with Allstate. “ The claims process was just evil, and I think what’s happened now is that more insurance companies have followed that.”
At Allstate, profit soared more than sixfold in the decade after McKinsey’s program was put in place. Its share price more than quadrupled, handily beating out the broader markets. The pay of Allstate’s top five executives, tied to the share price just as the McKinsey partner Arch Patton had envisioned half a century earlier, shot up. In 1994 their combined compensation amounted to $2.95 million. A decade later it had reached $19.3 million. In 2020 the top five executives made a combined $38.2 million, led by the CEO, Thomas Wilson. By 2021 the average salary of an Allstate worker was about $62,000, barely keeping up with inflation over twenty-five years.
Meanwhile, the percentage of premiums paid out on claims declined. Allstate executives and shareholders were becoming fabulously rich by reducing payouts, preventing many policyholders from getting all the money to which they were entitled. It was, said Russell Roberts, a former management consultant who is spending his retirement studying how McKinsey has altered the insurance industry, “reverse Robin Hood.”

* In 1987, Allstate paid out 70.9 cents in claims for every dollar it took in. By 1997, two full years into the McKinsey makeover, the ratio had fallen to 58.2. By 2006, after spiking a year earlier amid huge claims resulting from Hurricane Katrina, it was 47.6.

* …the McKinsey system resulted in the transfer of $94 billion from policyholders policyholders to Allstate coffers from 1995 to 2018. Add in State Farm and other companies that adopted the McKinsey system, and the total approaches $374 billion

* In 2007, Bloomberg Markets magazine published a searing investigation into how Allstate, State Farm, and other insurers, using the McKinsey method, were routinely lowballing offers to homeowners whose homes had been damaged or destroyed by natural disasters. The most famous irate claimant: the Mississippi Republican senator Trent Lott, who sued State Farm when the company wouldn’t pay for damage to his home from Hurricane Katrina. State Farm said the damage was from water (not covered), rather than wind (covered).
A 2003 fire in the San Diego area destroyed more than two thousand houses, but insurers, including Allstate and State Farm, refused to reimburse policyholders for the amount needed to replace their homes, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars below replacement value, Bloomberg reported. They were not being made whole.
Under state laws across the country, insurance companies are obligated to pay the fair value of whatever benefits their policyholders are entitled to. An insurance policy is, after all, a contract. But what makes the duty of insurance companies even more pressing is the fact that many kinds of insurance aren’t optional. Every driver is required by law to have auto insurance. Mortgage companies require people to buy homeowners insurance. An industry where the government compels people to buy their product is especially obligated to carry out its fiduciary duty.

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Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence

Posted on October 18, 2022 by Luke Ford

Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes in this 2021 book:

* We’re all running from pain. Some of us take pills. Some of us couch surf while binge-watching Netflix. Some of us read romance novels. We’ll do almost anything to distract ourselves from ourselves. Yet all this trying to insulate ourselves from pain seems only to have made our pain worse.

* Science teaches us that every pleasure exacts a price, and the pain that follows is longer lasting and more intense than the pleasure that gave rise to it.
With prolonged and repeated exposure to pleasurable stimuli, our capacity to tolerate pain decreases, and our threshold for experiencing pleasure increases.

* Mindfulness is simply the ability to observe what our brain is doing while it’s doing it, without judgment.

* Self-binding is the term to describe Jacob’s act of throwing out his machine. It is the way we intentionally and willingly create barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice in order to mitigate compulsive overconsumption. Self-binding is not primarily a matter of will, although personal agency plays some part. Rather, self-binding openly recognizes the limitations of will.
The key to creating effective self-binding is first to acknowledge the loss of voluntariness we experience when under the spell of a powerful compulsion, and to bind ourselves while we still possess the capacity for voluntary choice.
If we wait until we feel the compulsion to use, the reflexive pull of seeking pleasure and/or avoiding pain is nearly impossible to resist. In the throes of desire, there’s no deciding.
But by creating tangible barriers between ourselves and our drug of choice, we press the pause button between desire and action.

* My patient Mitch was addicted to sports betting. He had lost a million dollars gambling by the time he was forty. Participating in Gamblers Anonymous was an important part of his recovery. Through his involvement in Gamblers Anonymous, he learned that it wasn’t just betting on sports he had to avoid. He also had to abstain from watching sports on TV, reading the sports page in the newspaper, surfing sports-related Internet sites, and listening to sports radio. He called all the casinos in his area and had himself put on the “no-admit” list. By avoiding substances and behaviors beyond his drug of choice, Mitch was able to use categorical binding to mitigate the risk of relapse to sports betting.

* What if taking psychotropic drugs is causing us to lose some essential aspect of our humanity?
In 1993, the psychiatrist Dr. Peter Kramer published his groundbreaking book Listening to Prozac , in which he argued that antidepressants make people “better than well.” But what if Kramer got it wrong? What if instead of making us better than well, psychotropic drugs make us other than well ?
I’ve had many patients over the years who have told me that their psychiatric medications, while offering short-term relief from painful emotions, also limit their ability to experience the full range of emotions, especially powerful emotions like grief and awe.

* Hormesis is a branch of science that studies the beneficial effects of administering small to moderate doses of noxious and/or painful stimuli, such as cold, heat, gravitational changes, radiation, food restriction, and exercise.

* Radical honesty—telling the truth about things large and small, especially when doing so exposes our foibles and entails consequences—is essential not just to recovery from addiction but for all of us trying to live a more balanced life in our reward-saturated ecosystem. It works on many levels.
First, radical honesty promotes awareness of our actions. Second, it fosters intimate human connections. Third, it leads to a truthful autobiography, which holds us accountable not just to our present but also to our future selves. Further, telling the truth is contagious, and might even prevent the development of future addiction.

* Telling the truth draws people in, especially when we’re willing to expose our own vulnerabilities. This is counterintuitive because we assume that unmasking the less desirable aspects of ourselves will drive people away. It logically makes sense that people would distance themselves when they learn about our character flaws and transgressions.
In fact, the opposite happens. People come closer. They see in our brokenness their own vulnerability and humanity. They are reassured that they are not alone in their doubts, fears, and weaknesses.

* Any behavior that leads to an increase in dopamine has the potential to be exploited. What I’m referring to is a kind of “disclosure porn” that has become prevalent in modern culture, where revealing intimate aspects of our lives becomes a way to manipulate others for a certain type of selfish gratification rather than to foster intimacy through a moment of shared humanity.
At a medical conference on addiction in 2018, I sat next to a man who said he was in long-term recovery from addiction. He was there to tell his recovery story to the audience. Just before he went up on stage, he turned to me and said, “Get ready to cry.” I was put off by the comment. It bothered me that he anticipated how I would react to his story.
He indeed told a harrowing story of addiction and recovery, but I was not moved to tears, which surprised me because I am usually deeply affected by stories of suffering and redemption. In this case, his story seemed untrue for all that it may have been factually correct. The words he spoke didn’t match the emotions behind them. Instead of feeling that he was granting us privileged access to a painful time in his life, it felt like he was grandstanding and manipulating. Maybe it was just a matter of his having told it so many times before. In repetition, it may have grown stale. Whatever the reason, it didn’t lift me.
There is a well-known phenomenon in AA called “drunkalogues,” referring to tales of intoxicated exploits that are shared to entertain and show off rather than teach and learn. Drunkalogues tend to trigger craving rather than promote recovery. The line between honest self-disclosure and a manipulative drunkalogue is a fine one, including subtle differences in content, tone, cadence, and affect, but you know it when you see it.

* Patients who tell stories in which they are frequently the victim, seldom bearing responsibility for bad outcomes, are often unwell and remain unwell. They are too busy blaming others to get down to the business of their own recovery. By contrast, when my patients start telling stories that accurately portray their responsibility, I know they’re getting better.

* When our lived experience diverges from our projected image, we are prone to feel detached and unreal, as fake as the false images we’ve created. Psychiatrists call this feeling derealization and depersonalization. It’s a terrifying feeling, which commonly contributes to thoughts of suicide. After all, if we don’t feel real, ending our lives feels inconsequential.
The antidote to the false self is the authentic self. Radical honesty is a way to get there. It tethers us to our existence and makes us feel real in the world. It also lessens the cognitive load required to maintain all those lies, freeing up mental energy to live more spontaneously in the moment.
When we’re no longer working to present a false self, we’re more open to ourselves and others. As the psychiatrist Mark Epstein wrote in his book Going on Being about his own journey toward authenticity, “No longer endeavoring to manage my environment, I began to feel invigorated, to find a balance, to permit a feeling of connection with the spontaneity spontaneity of the natural world and with my own inner nature.”

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