Populism vs Neoconservatism (12-17-23)

01:00 Populism is popular but ineffective, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153654
10:00 What is populism? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populism
14:30 The rise of modern populism – Takis S. Pappas, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMNwUh0X5eI
33:40 How to understand power – Eric Liu, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c_Eutci7ack
53:00 Elliott Blatt goes to a sports bar
55:00 Colin Liddell joins to talk about National Justice Party, https://neokrat.blogspot.com/
56:20 Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
1:33:45 Are we morally declining? https://www.patreon.com/DecodingTheGurus/posts
1:34:00 WP: Think we’re losing our morals? That’s a common illusion, research says. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/06/15/humanity-morality-decline-illusion/
1:46:30 John Mearsheimer: There is no two-state solution, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-Rj5LibR1o

Posted in Populism, Radio | Comments Off on Populism vs Neoconservatism (12-17-23)

Populism, Neoconservatism & Lessons in the Application of Power

I’m a simple man who likes simple things like truth.

Here is one truth as I see it — populism is usually popular but rarely gets anything done, while neoconservatism is unpopular but gets much accomplished (such as the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq). Why?

I put “populism” into Youtube and one of the suggested videos is on power. Author Eric Liu says: “Power is the ability to have others do what you would have them do. This plays out in all arenas from family to the workplace to our relationships.”

Populism is bad at this while neoconservatism is excellent. Why? You’d think that if you have the people on your side, you’ll be good at getting others to conform. But life doesn’t work out like this most of the time. Why? Because numbers are only one component of power and democracy is not how the world works (most of the time).

Liu says the primary sources of political power are physical force, money, state action, social norms, ideas, and numbers. Populism has numbers but neoconservatism punches about its weight in the other elements of power. The neocons, for example, have instigated the use of American armed force overseas, they are amply funded, they know to press the levers of state action, and they enjoy disproportionate influence in the world of ideas. Their supporters are few but their powers have, at times, been vast.

One formidable neocon thinktank is the Institute for the Study of War. Notes Wikipedia:

ISW was founded in response to the stagnation of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with core funding provided by a group of defense contractors…

ISW criticized both the Obama and Trump administration policies on the Syrian conflict, advocating a more hawkish approach. In 2013, Kagan called for arms and equipment to be supplied to “moderate” rebels, with the hope that a state “friendly to the United States [would emerge] in the wake of Assad.”[9] In 2017, ISW analyst Christopher Kozak praised president Donald Trump for the Shayrat missile strike but advocated further attacks, stating that “deterrence is a persistent condition, not a one hour strike package.”[10] In 2018, ISW analyst Jennifer Cafarella published an article calling for the use of offensive military force against the Assad government…

Which think tanks favor a foreign policy tailored to America’s interests? I can’t think of any. Which pundits favor the same thing? I can only think of Tucker Carlson.

Professors Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer wrote in a 2006 paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”:

Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element. Some Americans believe that this was a “war for oil,” but there is hardly any direct evidence to support this claim. Instead, the war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure. According to Philip Zelikow, a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (2001‐2003), executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and now Counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the “real threat” from Iraq was not a threat to the United States.139 The “unstated threat” was the “threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a University of Virginia audience in September 2002, noting further that “the American government doesn’t want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell.”

…A May 2003 poll reported that over 60 percent of Americans were willing to withhold aid to Israel if it resisted U.S. pressure to settle the conflict, and that number rose to 70 percent among “politically active” Americans.115 Indeed, 73 percent said that United States should not favor either side…

…Within the United States, the main driving force behind the Iraq war was a small band of neoconservatives, many with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party.150 In addition, key leaders of the Lobby’s major organizations lent their voices to the campaign for war.151 According to the Forward, “As President Bush attempted to sell the . . . war in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.”152 The editorial goes on to say that “concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups.”

Although neoconservatives and other Lobby leaders were eager to invade Iraq, the broader American Jewish community was not.153 In fact, Samuel Freedman reported just after the war started that “a compilation of nationwide opinion polls by the Pew Research Center shows that Jews are less supportive of the Iraq war than the population at large, 52% to 62%.”154 Thus, it would be wrong to blame the war in Iraq on “Jewish influence.” Rather, the war was due in large part to the Lobby’s influence, especially the neoconservatives within it.

Since the Hamas attacks on southern Israel October 7, I’ve often left Fox News on in the background while I’m doing other things, and I don’t recall seeing any experts on the network advocating reduced American intervention overseas, even though that’s the one foreign policy that enjoys popular support. Instead, Fox News seems to do everything it can to promote war with Iran, Russia and China. The main expert Fox relies upon since October 7 is retired General Jack Keane who always pushes a hawkish line.

Insiders, experts, institutions, and billionaires are rarely populist, and without their support, it’s hard to get things done.

MAGA, the Tea Party and the Arab Spring were populist uprisings that had few accomplishments because they had few elites on their side.

Elites can’t rule against a united people. Elites need to cut deals with parts of a nation to rule and so elites tend to prefer multi-culturalism to national unity. The Democratic party in the United States, for examples, operates by cutting deals with the top and bottom of society against the white Christian middle.

Stephen Turner noted in his 2021 essay, “Ideology of Anti-populism & the Administrative State”:

* The people, the state, and expertise form an unstable triad, and relating the three in a coherent way, either institutionally or theoretically, is ultimately not possible. Finding a way of dealing with these relations nevertheless is a problem that needs to be solved and re-solved…

* Harvey Mansfield defined populism, by which he meant populism as a political idea, as the belief in the virtue of the people. ‘A populist let us say is a democrat who is satisfied with his own and with the people’s virtue’ (Mansfield, 1996, p. 7). Populism is thus based on a myth as well. But it is a myth whose role is primarily negative: it does not constitute an order, but rejects one in the name of the people. Actual rule requires more. But to deny the myth of the superior wisdom of the people is to threaten the democratic idea itself. And this poses a special problem for ostensibly ‘democratic’ regimes. The need for rulers requires its own ‘democratic’ myths, such as the theory of representation. But the myth of the people constrains these myths.

Mansfield follows his line on the populist with another: ‘This distinguishes him from a reformer who is satisfied with his own virtue but not with other people’s. Giving over government to the people is not the same as lecturing them’ (Mansfield, 1996, p. 7). Progressivism took this tack. The progressives of the early twentieth century wanted the support and enthusiasm of ‘the people’, and envied populism for this. But they wanted to lead the people themselves.

* Progressivism was to be the alliance of experts and an aroused ‘people’ (Turner, 1996). And this followed an emerging practice of social movements based on expertise, notably the prohibition movement, which employed the techniques presently associated with climate science under the heading alcohol science (Okrent, 2010; Turner, 2001, 2014), through this and other movements, became the third leg in the modem triad. And anti-populism came to take the form of a set of assertions about expertise and governance.

* The place to begin, with populism, is with the pure democratic idea itself. Classically, it means rule by the people, the demos. But we are accustomed to adding disclaimers and qualifications, or specifications, to this idea: that expressions of the will of the people must take the form of laws and procedures, such as election laws and laws governing representation; or from a liberal perspective, that genuine democratic will-formation requires free individuals with freedom of speech and various individual rights; or from the Left, that substantive equality rather than mere formal equality is required for meaningful democratic participation.

* Populism is intrinsically a denial of the special superiority of rulers and elites. …one can think of government as a scheme of reconciling the two: of adjusting the relation between the wishes of the ruled and the superior power of the ruler necessary to achieve political goods. …desirable governmental actions require expertise that the public lacks.

* The anti-populist, who is, unlike the populist, not satisfied with the people’s virtue, faces a fundamental problem: to deny populism is to deny democracy, or a founding element of the democratic idea, that the people should be, and are the best, governors of themselves. Thus anti-populism, if it pretends to be democratic, cannot overtly deny the myth of the people. But the need for rulers and for the justification of their rule creates an opportunity to redefine the democratic idea, to create an appropriate counter-myth that enables the people to have a place, but not to rule.

* Populism, by asserting the superior wisdom of the people, rejects the identification of power and expertise. But in doing so it calls into question the notion of democracy itself. If governments are legitimated by experts, what, exactly, is the point of democratic accountability? What role do ‘the people’ have other than to obey, or perhaps to occasionally ratify the system of governance as a whole?

* Populist movements happen when political parties, traditional leaders, elites, and politics as usual fail to deliver the expected goods, or fail to accord with the popular sense of reality, or are perceived as untrustworthy and corrupt.

* Populist tendencies are prone to co-optation, and typically do not outlast the situations that produced them, though they do represent a reserve of general sentiment against elites and particular ruling groups that can be activated in new situations. They differ from ideologies and ideological parties in that they are situational rather than analytic, in the sense that they have concrete targets and grievances rather than a developed analysis of political life that is extended to new situations and refined and elaborated. This accounts for many of the distinctive features of populist movements, especially the preference for leaders who promise to act decisively, in contrast to normal ‘politicians’, and their hostility to ‘politics as usual’.

Populisms are situation-driven rather than analysis-driven, or to put it differently, driven by specific crises or grievances, rather than by a permanent ideological viewpoint… Populism typically arises in situations in which there are larger failures, failures which extend beyond normal political processes, and therefore beyond mere legislation within existing political practices.

* The antinomy of populism is elite rule. Elites rule through particular strategies, and fail through typical issues. Elite solidarity is essential to elite rule; division among the elite is a typical cause of elite failure (Shipman, Edmunds & Turner, 2018). Elites rule through alliances between the elite and a significant non-elite group. The most stable of these alliances have been with the middle classes, normally under an ideology of meritocracy, property rights, and support of business, an alliance which is played off against the demands of the excluded group, the poor. But an upstairs-downstairs alliance is always possible, and the upper hand the elite has in dealing with the non-elite segments of society depends on its ability to choose alternative groups to ally with. Thus pluralism favours the elite, because it provides more opportunities to change alliances. Populism, in contrast, must produce enough unity in the population to effectively counter the elite, and must therefore transcend differences between segments of society in the name of the people. Both Left and Right populisms are anti-pluralist, as a simple consequence of the dynamics of elite alliance-making: neither kind of populism could succeed if the elite used its alliance-making power to divide the movement. To the extent that elite rule depends on manipulating and shifting alliances with non-elite groups, as is the norm (Shipman, Edmunds & Turner, 2018), an attack on pluralism is a threat to elite rule as a political system itself.

* Weber famously praised [William E.] Gladstone for his ability to break out of the constraints of party and speak directly to the people, and promoted a constitutional design that was intended to maximize the possibility of this kind of leadership. He thought of this as the only means to control the bureaucracy, which parties would not do. Just as Weber viewed the fundamental form of democratic rule as plebiscitarian, and wished to amplify plebiscitary possibilities and forms, the American populists endorsed ‘the legislative system known as the initiative and referendum’ (National People’s Party Platform, [1892] 1966, p. 95).

The point of anti-populism was to prevent the use of these means, and restrict accountability even more – to the point that it was anti-democratic in the name
of democracy.

During the 2016 Brexit debate, virtually all of Britain’s elites opposed Brexit, and yet the people passed the referendum and it became law.

Populism has no thinktanks. There are few career prospects for a populist intellectual, while dozens of scholars have jobs churning out articles and books promoting American intervention overseas.

I was thinking about these lofty issues while watching a wildly entertaining (but frequently fact-free) conversation between lefty comic Jimmy Dore and former TV host Tucker Carlson.

I heard so many glowing things about democracy in my youth that I took it for granted that it was the best way of running things. Then I grew up and experienced a world that extolled democracy while operating by dictatorship (women in charge particularly liked to talk about collaboration while acting in cliques that often ostracised me for failure to fall in line with their sacred programs – I think my ornery skeptical challenges wearied them). I can’t find many examples of important things in the world that operate on democratic principles aside from periodic political elections and 12-step programs.

I don’t know what world you live in, but in my world, I rarely hear about the problems that come with too much democracy. The media I consume promotes democracy as a transcendent good. Is that true? Is more and more democracy always for the best? If so, why does almost everything require hierarchy to function?

The world runs on dictatorial lines but our rhetoric is awash in democracy promotion. Perhaps we wouldn’t need to protest so much about the wonders of democracy if it really was this unalloyed good? I sense a giant mismatch between the reality I experience and what I’m told to believe about reality.

I don’t see much that is precious in the world that is not tightly guarded. The more precious the thing, the more guards. Free unregulated access to good things destroys them. Civilization requires walls.

Harvard Business School notes:

The tragedy of the commons refers to a situation in which individuals with access to a public resource (also called a common) act in their own interest and, in doing so, ultimately deplete the resource…

This theory explains individuals’ tendency to make decisions based on their personal needs, regardless of the negative impact it may have on others. In some cases, an individual’s belief that others won’t act in the best interest of the group can lead them to justify selfish behavior. Potential overuse of a common-pool resource—hybrid between a public and private good— can also influence individuals to act with their short-term interest in mind, resulting in the use of an unsustainable product and disregard the harm it could cause to the environment or general public.

To prevent the tragedy of the commons, you need hierarchy backed by force.

Dec. 9, 2023, Steve Sailer wrote:

The unpleasant reality is that, at the most fundamental level, most political opinion is a call for the use of, or threat to use, force. In essence, government relies on armed men enforcing the will of the government. So, First Amendment-protected expressions of political opinion tend to be, to some extent, calls for potential violence against somebody.

Calls for less Israeli retributive violence against Gazans, for example, can be interpreted, somewhat tendentiously but also somewhat accurately as being calls for more impunity for Hamas violence. Similarly, denunciations of Hamas’ October 7th massacre can be seen, with some degree of honesty, as potentially setting the stage for mass bombings of Gaza and the ethnic cleansing, if not outright genocide, of Gazans.

PBS Frontline did a powerful documentary, “After Uvalde: Guns, Grief & Texas Politics.” Police didn’t storm the unlocked classroom housing the killer for 77 minutes. A major reason for the slipshod response was that there was no hierarchy. There was no command post. There was no commander. Every man did what was right in his own eyes, and that usually meant staying out of harm’s way while children and teachers bled out.

Common sense suggests to me that most things in civilization such as religion, education, work, charity, law enforcement and the military require hierarchy to operate efficiently. I can’t imagine, for example, a democratic army or a democratic corporation running effectively.

It seems to me that life without hierarchy is a life of continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. According to the Mishnaic Tractate Ethics of the Fathers, “Rebbe Chanina, the assistant High Priest, says: Pray for the welfare of the government. For without fear of it, people would swallow each other alive.”

Without hierarchy, men swallow each other alive.

The most intense pleasure I have experienced has been in the course of intimate closed relations with beautiful young women. I am too modest to get into details, but suffice to say that these were not democratic experiences open to anyone. They were exclusive and hierarchical — I was hers and she was mine and we did things together that we didn’t do with other people. It usually went without saying that if either of us became more democratic in our approach to love, that meant the end of us.

My experience of formal education was not democratic. It was hierarchical. You had to go along to get along and what you thought was important didn’t usually matter much to those in charge. I loved Social Studies, but when my sixth grade class was required to build something, it didn’t matter to my teacher how many books I was eager to read and report on in this field. Because I wouldn’t build anything, I got a bad grade. Though better read than all of my classmates, I often got C grades in English through college because I wouldn’t parrot the lines and approaches expected of me.

Many of my teachers found me their most challenging student. My independent skeptical and rebellious approach was rarely conducive to my getting good grades and recommendations while students who colored within the lines had things easier.

I began working for people at age 11 and quickly discovered that work was slavery — you had to do what you were told on the job just like a slave and in your off-hours, you couldn’t say or do things that would get back to your employer and discomfort him. My fellow employees who pretended enthusiasm for their work and flattered their bosses tended both to get ahead and to get away. “I don’t pay you to think,” was one of the most frequent lines I heard from my bosses.

My father Desmond Ford was a Seventh-Day Adventist theologian who was scrupulous about the way he presented himself. He would walk around carrying holy books and he’d delve in and out of them while eating up the miles and maintaining a beatific countenance. He kept far away from any setting likely to be considered sinful, such as movie theaters. His whole life was dominated by his ministry. There was no public setting in which he didn’t feel a profound responsibility to be a holy man. He had no time off from being a representative of Jesus Christ.

As a church employee until 1980, he had to toe the line. In 1980 at the Glacier View Conference that decided his Adventist fate, General Conference President Neal Wilson stated that of course Adventist employees did not enjoy First-Amendment protected freedom of speech, and my father was consequently removed from the ministry.

Everybody has a boss. When the Church wasn’t my dad’s boss, the donors to my dad’s evangelical Christian ministry Good News Unlimited became his new boss, and he refrained from saying things in public that he knew to be true such as that Genesis 1 and 2 had different authors because he didn’t want to discomfort his donors. Many of his most fervent supporters were obsessed about the end of the world and he had to produce a product and a personality attentive to these needs.

The 2006 edition of the book, Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream, noted:

But important as Ford’s rebellion was, it did not have the lasting effect that Adventist leaders feared and that his followers hoped. The decisive way church leadership dealt with the crisis was a factor in this.. The sequence of events that leads from Questions on Doctrine to the dismissal of Desmond Ford is a remarkable example of the way in which a web of theological ideas can unravel once a single thread has been cut… Ford’s agitation itself was widely believed to be a portent of Christ’s soon coming…The church’s views on salvation and the Sanctuary remained in tact. Like all previous Adventist dissidents, Brinsmead and Ford disappeared from view, once separated from the church, and the denomination went on much as before… The outrage expressed by church scholars following Glacier View perhaps had less to do with the conviction that Ford was treated unfairly than with the realization that they had been outmaneuvered by the administration that had used them to discredit the Australian theologian.

Nevertheless, the removal of Ford marked the end of an era. The flame of open inquiry that had burned brightly with the founding of the AAF [Association of Adventist Forums] in 1968 was quenched by the events of 1980. Glacier View defined the limits of academic freedom in the modern church and left Adventist scholars defeated on the sidelines.

As I moved through my teens, I realized I was naturally pleasure-seeking, lazy and selfish, and if people in authority didn’t hold me accountable, I was not usually a shining light of God’s love and excellence. Reluctantly, I concluded that a non-hierarchical approach to tough things like work and learning and relationships would not bring out the best in me. If a boss, teacher or girlfriend allowed me my own inclinations, I behaved like a pig (doing as little unpleasant work as possible and taking other people into consideration rarely), but if I were called out for my bad behavior and threated with expulsion, I usually shaped up.

“This is not working out” is a phrase I’ve heard from teachers, bosses and girlfriends from seventh grade on, to which I would typically reply, “I can change, please give me another chance.” Sometimes they would and sometimes they wouldn’t.

After I twice told my shocked seventh-grade teacher to shut up, she said to me I would be happier getting home-schooled. That prospect filled me with horror and I dramatically improved my behavior toward her. Fear has been my great motivator.

In January 1994, I wrote about a painfully common experience of my life:

After saying goodnight to my rebbe, I turned to Paula and her Jewish friend Melanie who also attends Ohev Shalom synagogue.

“She wants to tell you that you’re obnoxious and rude,” Paula warned me. Melanie blushed and turned away.

“Go on,” Paula urged her friend. “Talk to him. He’ll listen.”

Melanie stepped up to me and stuttered. Stepping back, she stood on the curb and began again.

“Luke, you’re brilliant and fascinating, but you’d have more success if you toned down. People fear approaching you because of your intensity. Several members of the class may try to have you kicked out because you take time away from their relevant questions to go off on your own tangents.”

I reckon that “We didn’t know what to do with him” is the most frequent sentiment heard from those who endured my regular company in class (bosses always knew what to do with me and that usually meant firing me, sometimes within half an hour of starting a job). Only a hierarchical situation could tame me into behavior that approximated the socially acceptable.

A nice way that people have broken up with me is to say, “We want different things.” Many of my ex-friends, ex-partners and ex-bosses noticed that I was set on a life of poverty and ostracism while they preferred to live with connection and prosperity.

In March of 2000, I saw a psychiatrist in Brisbane who reported back: “Luke tends to make unreasonable demands of people who are eventually driven to setting limits on him. Luke takes this very badly.”

To the extent I’ve improved in this area, it’s because the results of my naturally selfish approach to life have become so painful that it has been easier for me to change rather than to keep getting humiliated.

My instincts are rarely sweetness and light and I don’t think I’m exceptional in my selfishness. All right-wing approaches to politics take it for granted that human nature is not basically good. While the left thinks that we are born good and are corrupted by society, the right thinks we’re born selfish and society makes us better.

The most dramatic example of this that comes to my mind is that people after age 30 rarely delight in publicly humiliating others to their face while that behavior seems habitual among kids.

When I was bedridden by Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in my 20s, almost everybody I encountered over 40 was kind to me while almost everyone under 25 wanted to flee from me.

If people aren’t basically good, how then shall they govern themselves? One approach is populism.

According to the first result in Google, populism is “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.”

According to Wikipedia:

Populism is a range of political stances that emphasize the idea of “the people” and often juxtapose this group with “the elite”.[1] It is frequently associated with anti-establishment and anti-political sentiment.[2] The term developed in the late 19th century and has been applied to various politicians, parties and movements since that time, often as a pejorative.

A common framework for interpreting populism is known as the ideational approach: this defines populism as an ideology that presents “the people” as a morally good force and contrasts them against “the elite”, who are portrayed as corrupt and self-serving.[4] Populists differ in how “the people” are defined, but it can be based along class, ethnic, or national lines. Populists typically present “the elite” as comprising the political, economic, cultural, and media establishment, depicted as a homogeneous entity and accused of placing their own interests, and often the interests of other groups—such as large corporations, foreign countries, or immigrants—above the interests of “the people”.[5] According to the ideational approach, populism is often combined with other ideologies, such as nationalism, liberalism, or socialism. Thus, populists can be found at different locations along the left–right political spectrum, and there exist both left-wing populism and right-wing populism.[6]

…In popular discourse—where the term has often been used pejoratively—it has sometimes been used synonymously with demagogy, to describe politicians who present overly simplistic answers to complex questions in a highly emotional manner, or with political opportunism, to characterise politicians who seek to please voters without rational consideration as to the best course of action.

Some scholars have linked populist policies to adverse economic outcomes, as “economic disintegration, decreasing macroeconomic stability, and the erosion of institutions typically go hand in hand with populist rule.”

Emily B. Finley writes in her 2022 book The Ideology of Democratism:

* Democratism can perhaps best be summed up as the belief that democracy is real or genuine only to the degree that it reflects an idealized conception of the popular will. The president of Freedom House was oriented by this democratist conception of democracy when he declared popular majorities a “threat” to democracy.

* It is routine to hear about this or that policy or action being urgently needed in order to “save democracy,” for example. Yet increasingly, it seems, democracy must be rescued from itself. It must be saved even from popular majorities. The term “populist,” paradoxically, is now often used to indicate those who allegedly wish to destroy democracy. “Populists” are often derided as “authoritarians” or “fascists.” The democratist ideology has created the framework for this otherwise perplexing phenomenon, equating populism with what would seem to be its opposite: authoritarianism.

* The editors of the recent Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (2018) bemoan the global ascendancy of “post-truth” politics and the rise of populist leaders. These deliberative democrats and others assume that if the people were better educated and more informed, they would naturally reject the populist leaders whom they had once supported.

* President of Freedom House Michael J. Abramowitz laments that “right-wing populists gained votes and parliamentary seats in France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria during 2017.” “While they were kept out of government in all but Austria,” Abramowitz says, “their success at the polls helped to weaken established parties on both the right and left.” These “right-wing populists,” according to Freedom House, are a source of the global democratic “crisis.”

The news media say our democracy is under threat, but both of America’s major parties have strong anti-democratic tendencies. Ross Douthat wrote in the New York Times Feb. 2, 2022:

…conservatism has always had a fraught relationship to mass democracy. The fear of mob rule, of demagogues rallying the masses to destroy a fragile social order, is a common theme in many different right-wing schools of thought, showing up among traditionalist defenders of aristocracy and libertarians alike.

To these general tendencies, we can add two specifically American forms of conservative anxiety about the franchise: the fear of corrupt urban-machine politics that runs back through the 1960 presidential election to the age of Tammany Hall and the racist fear of African American political power that stamped the segregation-era South.

Because all these influences touch the modern G.O.P., conservative skepticism about mass democracy was a somewhat normal part of American politics long before Donald Trump came along — and some of what’s changed in the Trump era is just an events-driven accentuation of existing tendencies…

Republicans have long feared voter fraud and noncitizen voting, for instance, but the fear — and for liberals, the oft-discussed hope — that demographic change could deliver permanent Democratic power has raised the salience of these anxieties. Likewise, Republicans have long been more likely to portray America as a republic, not a democracy, and to defend our system’s countermajoritarian mechanisms. But today this philosophical tendency is increasingly self-interested, because shifts in party coalitions mean that those mechanisms, the Senate and Electoral College especially, advantage Republicans somewhat more than in the recent past.

But then things get complicated, because the modern Republican Party is also the heir to a strong pro-democracy impulse, forged in the years when Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon won crushing presidential-level majorities but conservatives felt themselves constantly balked by unelected powers, bureaucrats and judges especially.

This experience left the right deeply invested in the idea that it represents the true American majority — moral, silent, what have you — while liberalism stands for elite power, anti-democratic forms of government, the bureaucracy and the juristocracy and the Ivy League.

And that idea and self-image have remained a potent aspect of the right-wing imagination even as the old Nixon and Reagan majorities have diminished and disappeared: With every new age of grass-roots activism, from the Tea Party to the local-education revolts of today, the right reliably casts itself as small-d democrats, standing boldly athwart liberal technocracy singing “Yankee Doodle.”

Against this complicated backdrop, Trump’s stolen-election narratives should be understood as a way to reconcile the two competing tendencies within conservatism, the intellectual right’s skepticism of mass democracy and comfort with countermajoritarian institutions with the populist right’s small-d democratic self-image. In Trump’s toxic dreampolitik there’s actually no tension there: The right-wing coalition is justified in governing from a minoritarian position because it deserves to be a true electoral majority, and would be if only the liberal enemy weren’t so good at cheating.

…liberalism is the heir to its own not exactly democratic tradition — the progressive vision of disinterested experts claiming large swaths of policymaking for their own and walling them off from the vagaries of public opinion, the whims of mere majorities.

This vision — what my colleague Nate Cohn recently called “undemocratic liberalism” — is a pervasive aspect of establishment politics not only in the United States but across the Western world. On question after controverted question, its answer to “Who votes?” is different from its answer to “Who decides?” In one case, the people; in the other, the credentialed experts, the high-level stakeholders and activist groups, the bureaucratic process.

Who should lead pandemic decision making? Obviously Anthony Fauci and the relevant public-health bureaucracies; we can’t have people playing politics with complex scientific matters. Who decides what your local school teaches your kids? Obviously teachers and administrators and education schools; we don’t want parents demanding some sort of veto power over syllabuses. Who decides the future of the European Union? The important stakeholders in Brussels and Berlin, the people who know what they’re doing, not the shortsighted voters in France or Ireland or wherever. Who makes important U.S. foreign policy decisions? Well, you have the interagency process, the permanent regional specialists and the military experts, not the mere whims of the elected president.

Or to pick a small but telling example recently featured in this newspaper, who decides whether an upstate New York school district gets to retain the Indian as its high school mascot? The state’s education commissioner, apparently, who said the state could cut funds to the school board that voted to keep it unless the board reverses course.

Pure democracy (direct rule by the people) is not practical, and even representative democracy requires considerable elements of dictatorship to function just as dictatorships often contain elements of democracy. The world is rarely pure.

People argue about whether or not countries such as the United States are a democracy or an oligopoly. I think this is a shallow discussion. All functioning first-world countries contain elements of dictatorship, democracy, oligopoly, socialism, free market capitalism, dictatorship and other forms of rule.

In 2010, two law professors published an important paper called “Constitutional Dictatorship: Its Dangers and Its Design”:

* If Americans know one thing about their system of government, it is that they live in a democracy and that other, less fortunate people, live in dictatorships. Dictatorships are what democracies are not, the very opposite of representative government under a constitution.

The opposition between democracy and dictatorship, however, is greatly overstated.

* No matter how well designed a constitutional system might be, the true sovereign will always be able to escape the confines of that design and make exceptions to it.

* Emergency, or at least claims of emergency, are the standard cause and the standard justification for creating dictatorships.

* The first decade of the twenty-first century has made us all too aware of the various dangers that can plague our social orders; even the cost of terrorist attacks may pale in comparison to the damage wrought by tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, or dangerous viruses. Thus in 2009, the President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon, placed the entire country under a “state of emergency” because of the potential swine flu pandemic. As John Ackerman, chief editor of the Mexican Law Review has explained, this serves to: “concentrate political power in his hands…. [President Calderon] has authorized his health secretary to inspect and seize any person or possessions, set up check points, enter any building or house, ignore procurement rules, break up public gatherings, and close down entertainment venues. The decree states that this situation will continue ‘for as long as the emergency lasts.’. . . This action violates the Mexican Constitution, which normally requires the government to obtain a formal judicial order before violating citizens’ civil liberties. Even when combating a ‘grave threat’ to society, the president is constitutionally required to get congressional approval for any suspension of basic rights. There are no exceptions to this requirement.”

* John Yoo, the author of the notorious “torture memos,” has argued that, despite American objections to King George III, the President still enjoys the powers possessed by the English monarch at the time of the American Revolution. Although Parliament retained the powers of the purse, Yoo explains, the King possessed unbounded discretion over the use of military force.

The first result in Google for defining neoconservatism states “a political ideology characterized by an emphasis on free-market capitalism and an interventionist foreign policy.”

I think of neoconservatism as an ideology that primarily promotes the use of American force to make the world safe for Israel.

According to Wikipedia:

Neoconservatives typically advocate the unilateral promotion of democracy and interventionism in international affairs, grounded in a militaristic and realist philosophy of “peace through strength.”

…Paul Gottfried has written that the neocons’ call for “permanent revolution” exists independently of their beliefs about Israel,[101] characterizing the neoconservatives as “ranters out of a Dostoyevskian novel, who are out to practice permanent revolution courtesy of the U.S. government.”

“What make neocons most dangerous are not their isolated ghetto hang-ups, like hating Germans and Southern whites and calling everyone and his cousin an anti-Semite, but the leftist revolutionary fury they express.”

Populists oppose the ruling elite by definition and consequently are rarely elite themselves. Neoconservatives are at home among the elites and know how to influence them. For example, neither President George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney nor Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld were neoconservatives but they acted in office like neocons.

Wikipedia notes:

Many adherents of neoconservatism became politically influential during the Republican presidential administrations of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, peaking in influence during the administration of George W. Bush, when they played a major role in promoting and planning the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Prominent neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration included Paul Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Bremer.

Although U.S Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had not self-identified as neoconservatives, they worked closely alongside neoconservative officials in designing key aspects of George W. Bush’s foreign policy; especially in their support of Israel, promotion of American influence in the Arab World and launching the “War on Terror”.[3] Bush administration’s domestic and foreign policies were heavily influenced by major ideologues affiliated with neo-conservatism, such as Bernard Lewis, Lulu Schwartz, Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, Robert Kagan, etc.

Power is usually an insiders game and populists are rarely insiders.

Donald Trump ran a populist campaign to get elected president of the United States in 2016 but he failed to recruit many populists to his administration. Instead, the federal government was run by people opposed to populism.

The further left you go, the more you get the idea that the government should be run by experts, who are rarely popular.

Philosopher Stephen P. Turner wrote in his 2003 book Liberal Democracy 3.0: Civil Society in an Age of Experts:

* Expertise is a kind of violation of the conditions of rough equality presupposed by democratic accountability. Some activities, such as genetic engineering, are apparently out of reach of democratic control, even when these activities, because of their dangerous character, ought perhaps to be subject to public scrutiny and regulation, precisely because of imbalances in knowledge. As such we are faced with the dilemma of capitulation to ‘rule by experts’ or democratic rule that is ‘populist’; that valorizes the wisdom of the people even when ‘the people’ are ignorant and operate on the basis of fear and rumor.

* …the socialist idea was implicitly an idea that was antipopulist or at least hostile to the notion that untutored legislative preferences, that is to say the opinions held by ordinary people of what laws should be enacted, ought to be paramount, and thus implicitly hostile to a related idea that government by discussion
ought to be the center of constitutional order. The ‘collectivist current’ and
socialist doctrine emphasized instead the superior wisdom of the state, and the consequent necessity of intrusions into freedoms of individuals.

In his 2013 book The Politics of Expertise, Turner wrote: “populism [relies upon] the expertise of the people… [in] contrast to that of the administrative class.”

Turner and Gerard Delanty wrote in their introduction to the 2022 book Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory:

Populism as a concept and practice is closely related to democracy, but the concepts are distinct. Populism arises as a reaction of “democratic resentment” of failures of democracy in which “the people” are treated as inferior, are excluded, and in which suffering is blamed on elites, leading to a call to a return to the original sense of democracy as the rule of the people… The idea of rule by the people – a literal impossibility – paradoxically implies both self-rule and resentment over being ruled.

In his memoir Mad Hazard: A Life in Social Theory, Stephen P. Turner wrote:

* My politics, by the beginning of the anti-war movement, were antiestablishment and populist – not an unintelligible combination, but not a common one. The war, as we now know from the reporting of Sy Hersh, was a Kennedy concoction run by Harvard elitists like McGeorge Bundy, who thought nothing of throwing away the lives of young people who were not of their kind under the supervision of the inept William Westmoreland, lying about the successes, and failing to take the opportunities that they were given to end the slaughter. This was a class war as well as a generational war.

* My instincts were populist, and not really in tune with the times, during the Sixties and later, when there was still faith in the efficacy of government programs based on assumed technical experience and implemented by massive bureaucracies.

In his 1988 classic, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession, Peter Novick wrote:

* The approach which [Richard] Hofstadter took to the Populists was the first important example of what became a common feature of cold war historical scholarship, the social-psychologizing of dissidence and insurgency. Taking up themes which received wide currency in The Authoritarian Personality, and the literature which grew up around that much discussed work, Europeanists discussed the irrational drives and longings which led people to embrace Nazism or Communism, while Americanists explored the unconscious forces which produced Populists, Progressives, and abolitionists. If those who wrote in this vein never went quite to the point of identifying protest per se with pathology, and acceptance of the status quo with mental health, they often came close to it.

* With minor exceptions (Parsons in the one camp, Pollack in the other), those critical of the Populists were Jews and from the Northeast; those defending them were gentiles, and from the South or Midwest. This feature of the controversy was well known to the participants and many contemporary observers, but was usually mentioned only obliquely, if at all. It tacitly raised issues of perspectivism and universalism which, for the moment, the profession preferred not to discuss openly.

In the early 1960s Carl Bridenbaugh outraged a good many historians with his AHA presidential address. In what was universally taken to be a reference to Jews, who were for the first time becoming a significant presence in the profession, Bridenbaugh deplored the fact that whereas once American historians had shared a common culture, and rural upbringing, the background of the present generation would “make it impossible for them to communicate to and reconstruct the past for future generations.” They suffered from an “environmental deficiency”: being “urban-bred” they lacked the “understanding . . . vouchsafed to historians who were raised in the countryside or in the small town.” They were “products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They find themselves in a very real sense outsiders on our past and feel themselves shut out. This is certainly not their fault, but it is true.”

* None, so far as I can tell, ever advanced what seems to me the most compelling reason why a group of the background of Hofstadter, Bell, Lipset, and their friends should have taken such a uniformly and exaggeratedly bleak view of the Populists: they were all only one generation removed from the Eastern European shtetl, where insurgent gentile peasants spelled pogrom.

Perhaps one reason populism doesn’t get much done in the United States is that Jews tend to fear it?

June 19, 2016, Armin Rosen wrote for Tabletmag:

Dave Rubin, the Voice of Liberals Who Were Mugged by Progressives

…Then the conversation lurched in a less savory direction. This sometimes happens on The Rubin Report, given some of the riskier guests Rubin has hosted since his show launched in August of 2015—people like English Defense League founder and anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson, or pro-Trump author and Twitter pugilist Mike Cernovich.

As I wrote on my blog June 21, 2016:

What makes Mike Cernovich a risky guest for a podcast? Because he’s an eloquent supporter of Trump? That’s just the surface reason. The real reason that Cernovich is a risky guest is that he is a threat to Armin Rosen’s hero system.

Let us step back a bit. Can you imagine a right-winger saying anybody is a risky guest for a podcast? No. Right-wing people don’t talk and think that way. They’re not afraid of anybody’s ideas. Only the left consider people “risky” guests for a podcast.

So the risk is to whom? The risk is to a hero system.

The stronger the Japanese identify as Japanese, the more likely they are to have negative views of outsiders. The stronger the Australian gets in his Australian identity, the more likely he is to have negative views of outsiders. The stronger the Muslim gets in his Muslim identity, the more likely he is to have negative views on non-Muslims. The stronger the black gets in his black identity (Nation of Islam, etc), the more likely he is to have negative views of non-blacks.

Not only will a goy with a strong racial/national/religious identity be more likely to dislike Jews, he will be more likely to organize around that view and to take action on it.

So when Armin Rosen says people like Mike Cernovich and Tommy Robinson are risky guests for a podcast, he’s implicitly recognizing that populism and nationalism are an easy sell to goyim because they naturally incline to strong identities that are likely to be anti-Jewish.

Jewish survival and prosperity in the West has usually been based on deals with elites. Jews have rarely been popular. Organized Jewry has cut deals with elites such as kings and nobles and the ruling class. In exchange for protection, Jews contribute money and other resources to the rulers. But always under the surface, populist, nationalist anti-Jewish sentiments are busting to get out. These anti-Jewish tendencies are usually strongest in corporate countries (Muslim, Catholic, East Asian countries) and weakest in individualist Protestant countries.

Another reason that populism doesn’t get much done is that it tends to be narrow, shallow, and lacking in complexity. It’s often politics for dummies.

A 2011 academic paper “Ears Wide Shut: Epistemological Populism, Argutainment and Canadian Conservative Talk Radio” noted:

* What is the epistemology of AOL [Adler On Line, hosted by Charles Adler] and how does it function? Broadly, it is a perspective which we call epistemological populism since it borrows heavily from the rhetorical patterns of political discourses of populism to valorize the knowledge of “the common people,” which they possess by virtue of their proximity to everyday life, as distinguished from the rarefied knowledge of elites which reflects their alienation from everyday life and the common sense it produces. Epistemological populism is established through a variety of rhetorical techniques and assumptions: the assertion that individual opinions based upon firsthand experience are much more reliable as a form of knowledge than those generated by theories and academic studies; the valorization of specific types of experience as particularly reliable sources of legitimate knowledge and the extension of this knowledge authority to unrelated issues; the privileging of emotional intensity as an indicator of the reliability of opinions; the use of populist-inflected discourse to dismiss other types of knowledge as elitist and therefore illegitimate; and finally, the appeal to “common sense” as a discussion-ending trump card. Let’s examine how these parts fit together in concrete terms.

“Opinions that are armed with life experience, that’s what we’re looking for on this show.” One of the many promos that transitioned AOL into commercial breaks, this particular declaration offers an excellent entry point into our analysis of AOL’s epistemological populism as it deftly captures the program’s unequivocal preference for political sentiments which emerge directly from the crucible of both ordinary and extraordinary experience at the individual level. Such individual experience is what lies at the core of the common sense which is consistently celebrated on the program as a counterpoint to the excessively ideological, intellectual or idealistic politics of those who lack grounding in the “real world.”

“Opinions are great, I always say on this program. Opinions are wonderful. But opinions armed with personal experience, knowledge. Man, those opinions are a whole lot better” (December 14, 1–2 p. m.) On this view, knowledge that grows out of an individual’s lived experience is knowledge one can trust. Indeed, knowledge and experience become virtually identical. An individual’s lived proximity to something becomes an index of their capacity to truly understand it, care about it, develop valid opinions about it and speak about it with authority. Conversely, the more abstract the form of knowledge and reasoning, the less rooted in concrete individual experiences, the more such knowledge is to be regarded with suspicion, especially when their conclusions contradict the wisdom of common sense and practical, everyday experience.

…the type of guests, callers and experiences through which the program legitimized certain opinions and knowledge about crime rely on and reinforce epistemological populism. There was virtually no discussion of statistical crime rates at all. Instead, evidence of the urgency of this issue largely took the form of guests and callers serving up a mix of anecdotal confirmation and common sense observations which themselves function as theoretical generalizations while simultaneously disavowing their theoretical status. Has violent crime become a major problem in Canadian cities? Has Canadian penal practice become a revolving door for violent offenders? The answer for Adler was clear. “If I opened up the lines and simply discussed situations that people are aware of,” he explained, “I mean, some people actually, you know, have scrapbooks on this stuff, of situations where people involved in heinous crimes are either those out on parole or have committed two, three, four, five, six other crimes and simply sit in the bucket for a year or two. We could do a show like that and go for twenty-four hours and still have phone calls to do” (January 6, 1–2 p.m.) As the anecdotes pile up in segment after segment, they not only immunize listeners against countervailing arguments and evidence about declining crime rates or the futility of law-and-order campaigns. Equally importantly, they valorize the accumulation of anecdotes as a viable form of populist knowledge making, enabling out-of-hand dismissal of contradictory arguments, reasoning or facts as untrue.

What is key here is how Adler’s affirmation of a mode of experiential political reasoning, which effortlessly shifts back and forth between personal experience (either one’s own or others) and broader social and political questions, invariably champions the former as providing answers to the latter. Broader trends or perspectives are never allowed to challenge the generalizability of certain individual experiences. But one of the challenges faced by such an experience-based epistemology is that not everyone’s experience is the same. Not all anecdotes fit the common sense conclusions served up by AOL. So how does Adler distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate forms of individual knowledge, experience and common sense?

Part of the answer lies in a straightforward ideological filtering of guests which, for the most part, strains out those whose experiences, opinions and epistemological framework differ from Adler’s own.

* Epistemological populism, however, goes well beyond opening up space for individual experience as one type of valid knowledge that deserves its place alongside a variety of others. Rather, epistemological populism tends to elevate individual experience as the only legitimate form and extend that epistemological authority well beyond the realm where the person’s immediate experience itself might be seen as relevant.

* …police officials and correctional workers though not social workers were consistently positioned as having a monopoly on expert knowledge in this area.

* Adler’s introduction encourages the audience to accept the constable’s opinions as facts—as the objective truth—not on the basis of any evidence presented but rather because the constable’s “day to day level” experience as a police officer… grants him a special, automatic epistemological authority.

If the persuasive force of epistemological populism flows, in part, from its ability to activate and apply (at an epistemological level) the populist celebration of “the people” and common sense, it also uses the other side of the populist trope—the attack on elites—to dismiss contending forms of knowledge and political opinions. The laudable voices of the people are contrasted with the “elitist” views of academics, defence lawyers and political progressives who were condemned as representing the “special interests” of criminals and gangs.

* we call the performative model embodied in AOL’s discourse argutainment and argue that this style has several defining characteristics. Self-consciously adopted and defended by means of a populist logic which defines itself as a utopian alternative to mainstream models of journalism, argutainment justifies itself through its ability to speak to and represent the interests of “the people.” In defining what is good for the people, it moves effortlessly between political and market tropes in which commercial success and the public good are fused together. What people want in commercial terms (as evidenced by market share) and what people need in political terms (alternative perspectives which cut through the morass of mainstream media) is represented as ultimately the same thing: a provocative and entertaining style of debate, defined as highly emotional and passionate, strongly opinionated, simple and brief and very confrontational. Moreover, argutainment assumes that an aggressive and opinionated host is needed to filter out ideas and modes of speech which he… judges the audience does not want to hear…

Adler frequently uses populist tropes to implicitly and explicitly justify his style of discourse. He regularly celebrates his style as ushering in a “broadcast revolution” in which the antiquated conventions of journalism and the bland, empty rhetoric of public relations are swept aside in the interests of energizing political discussion and debate. He invites us to participate in a populist renewal of the public sphere in which public discussion and debate simulates what he imagines at kitchen tables and coffee shops of the nation, a frank, honest and confrontational exchange of opinion that is open to anyone who wants to join the conversation. Unsurprisingly, one of the most powerful rhetorical defenses offered for his style is the supposed contrast between it and the decayed elitist forms it seeks to replace. For Adler, mainstream media’s traditional commitment to balance, objectivity and politically correct speech—all of which tend to be lumped together—have led to an anemic (and boring) public sphere in which an unconditional respect for the views of others has emasculated our capacity and desire to make difficult but necessary political judgments. According to Adler, such norms have become the shelter of those whose claims could not otherwise withstand the scrutiny of common sense reasoning and experience. Calls for balance and objectivity merely encourage an apathetic public sphere and allow the political claims of vocal special interests to exercise disproportionate influence. In this context, a style that is confrontational, aggressive and highly passionate is politically valuable since it shakes people free from an elite-induced apathy and ignorance.

* For Adler, a pervasive elitist commitment to a polite, nonconfrontational, politically correct style stands in the way of an open, honest and frank discussion of social problems and how they should be addressed. Complexity is stigmatized as little more than an excuse to avoid asking the tough questions and, conversely, a willingness to violate PC conventions of “cultural sensitivity” becomes, in and of itself, a sign of lucid and honest speech. In fact, it becomes a sign of moral courage.

* Adler often openly ruminates on the value of his style, congratulating himself for having the fortitude to challenge political correctness as an organic defender of the people’s interests and pointing to his ratings as the market share equivalent of a democratic vote of confidence in support of his approach. In the final days of the campaign, for example, Adler boasted that the show’s higher ratings were a tribute to his bold and aggressive style.

* The populist genius of talk radio may very well lie in its ability to portray the logic of commercialism (treating political talk as an entertainment commodity) as a politically virtuous invigoration of democracy. According to this logic, the discipline imposed by the need to entertain also keeps political speech honest, accessible and authentic and counteracts the mainstream media’s counterproductive pursuit of diversity, balance, objectivity, moderation. In this view, “giving the people what they want” does not lead to the decline of public discourse but instead to its invigoration and democratic rebirth by welcoming in the values and priorities of ordinary Canadians. Market logic, the logic of commercial culture, is recast as an instrument of political democratization, the means by which the people are put back in charge of the public sphere…

* Adler consistently reminds his audience that serving their needs and interests is his top priority and that all interventions he makes to discipline and shape political speech are designed to make the discussion more palatable to them.

The Jimmy Dore – Tucker Carlson discussion exemplifies these two qualities of popular right-wing discourse. It is grounded in the transcendent truth of their individual experiences and the discussion was “passionate, simple and entertaining.” This feels good but it might not do good.

Posted in Adventist, Neoconservatives, Populism | Comments Off on Populism, Neoconservatism & Lessons in the Application of Power

Their Friendship Dissolved Over Monetarism

“Betrayal” is the hyperbolic term we often use when we find out that other people have different priorities from what we expected. The best book I’ve read on this topic is Betrayals: The Unpredictability of Human Relations by Gabriella Turnaturi:

With betrayal, we are faced with the greatest tragedy of human relations: the fact that the other is unknowable… Every interactions arises and grows around sharing something…with an other… The birth of a We brings with the possibility of betrayal, separation, or rupture. …betrayal, dramatic or banal, always lies in wait for us. …not only in every relationship, but in every interaction, parts of ourselves that we were unaware of come to light… Betrayal is always relational and always possible.

In the first biography of economist Milton Friedman, the 2023 book The Last Conservative, Jennifer Burns writes about Friedman’s relationship with his mentor, Arthur F. Burns, who became head of the Federal Reserve:

But then came a shock. Opening the newspaper one May evening, Friedman saw unbelievable headlines: “Wage Guide Urged by Burns in Break with Nixon Policy,” announced The New York Times, while The Wall Street Journal had “Burns Backs Use of Wage-Price Program of Some Sort to Bolster Inflation Fight.” All the major newspapers carried the story…

Far more than a policy disagreement, for Friedman the speech was a profound rupture in his emotional universe. Later that evening, after hours of tossing and turning, Friedman arose from his bed and poured out his anguish. The “incomes policy speech” had left him sleepless, “saddened, dismayed, + depressed,” he wrote to Burns in a passionate letter. “Though I know this is not fair or right or generous—the word that keeps coming to mind is ‘betrayed.’” How could Burns—who had repeated again and again
his stance against wage and price controls—make such a reversal? The letter tacked between incredulity and loss. “Never in my wildest dreams did I believe that the central bank virus was so potent that it could corrupt even you in so short a time,” Friedman mourned. Maybe there was a case to be made for incomes policy, but he simply could not imagine what it was. “Incomes policy, in any shape + form, is bad economics + the entering wedge for still worse economics,” he wrote. It would obscure the real
progress recently made in slowing inflation. Incomes policy would get the credit that belonged to monetary restraint. And, Friedman continued, the proposal “verges, in my mind, on the dishonest in spreading lies to the public.” It was simply not true that inflation was “produced by unions”— rather it was produced “only in Washington,” by misguided policy.33 Even Burns himself had said as much, in the past. Although Friedman called only the policy dishonest, the implications extended to Burns’s character.

Stepping back, for a moment Friedman grasped that his letter was “melodramatic rather than cold and logical.” But his missives to Burns had always resembled diary entries; never before had he dissembled or masked his feelings. It was obvious to all who knew him that Friedman loved being the smartest guy in the room. It was also clear he loved to smash idols. Pigou, Keynes, Samuelson—his whole life, names others worshipped were
his targets. But underneath all this, imperceptibly running through the years, was a contrapuntal desire for a wise man, a counselor, a superior, someone to admire and esteem. Burns, arriving in the fatherless Friedman’s life just as he considered his professional future, had played this role for decades.

“Arthur, there remains no one whom I so admire + feel so close to—Rose only excepted—and so hate to hurt,” Friedman told him in his closing lines…

As a fellow Jewish man with immigrant roots who had risen fast and far, Burns was in some ways a natural father figure, but in other ways he never quite fit the role. Friedman’s closest relationships were always with those who shared his fundamental orientation to economics and politics.

True, he retained cordial relationships with his opponents. But friendship,
as it developed in his life, was rarely about the simple joy of companionship. From his student days in Chicago to his marriage with Rose, Friedman had always blended ideological, professional, and personal ties. Burns’s speech, with its reference to cost-push inflation, revealed a truth that was perhaps the most painful of all: Burns did not accept Friedman’s theory of inflation…

Friedman had somehow managed to evade the obvious. Burns was an institutional economist and a moderate Republican, but he was not a Friedmanite or even Friedmanesque. The two men were poles apart on the most important economic issue of the time.

Soon after, Friedman realized to his horror that their differences would
be the subject of wide public discussion…

When the two finally connected over the phone, more than a week after Friedman’s first midnight letter, Burns was cold. In fact, he didn’t want to talk to anyone over the holiday, he told Friedman. “You were clearly politely saying that you did not want to talk to me,” Friedman reflected in a second late-night scrawl. “I was so taken aback + so slow in comprehending what you were really saying that I fear I lapsed into incoherence.” Their awkward conversation showed Friedman that “my earlier letter was a major blunder.”38 No less than Friedman, Burns must have felt betrayal, too. Here he was at the pinnacle of his career, under the white-hot lights of national fame—and his most trusted admirer and friend had only criticism to offer…

In midsummer [1973], Friedman received a pointed letter from a reader he did not know. “You used to flagellate the Federal Reserve for its misdeeds. And you had good reason,” remembered the reader. “But the reasons you have had since 1969 have been far more compelling. And yet for the most part you seem to have remained silent and diplomatic.”94 The letter prompted a reckoning of sorts. “Mea culpa,” Friedman pleaded in response, explaining, “Arthur Burns is a revered former teacher of mine, one of my closest personal friends for forty years, and also a man for whose character and
ability I have tremendous admiration.”

…Friedman had always venerated Burns, continuing to treat him with deference even as his career transformed them into equals. In turn, Burns perpetually regarded Friedman as some sort of overgrown undergraduate; a welcome contributor to research, but certainly not someone with meaningful ideas that might alter his own. He may even have perversely resisted his former student’s advice, just to keep the hierarchy intact.

During the Ford administration, Friedman’s letters to Burns trickled to a halt. Inflation remained stubbornly high, hovering at almost 9 percent in 1975 before surging again to 11 percent and then, in 1980, reaching an unprecedented 13.5 percent. Burns would go down in history as the man on the watch during the Great Inflation, with prices during his tenure climbing an average of 7 percent annually. What was there left to say, except “I told you so”?

In his 2015 paper, Shifting identification: A theory of apologies and pseudo-apologies, professor Joshua Bentley wrote:

People identify with each other and act collectively because they have common beliefs, goals, concerns, or enemies. For instance, people who vote for a political party or cheer for a particular sports team do so because they identify somehow with that party or team. Although people naturally strive for identification, Burke (1969) also wrote, “one need not scrutinize the concept of ‘identification’ very sharply to see, implied in it at every turn, its ironic counterpart: division” (p. 23). Identification implies division because if people were not separated from one another they would have no reason to seek identification. At the same time, when people do identify with certain groups or ideas, they inevitably reject or dissociate themselves from other groups or ideas. In the United States, for example, identifying with the Republican Party means separating oneself from the Democratic Party…

…attitudes toward people and objects influence each other. Heider proposed a model in which a person (P) and some other person (O) both hold opinions about an object, idea, or event (X). In Heider’s P–O–X model, the opinions of P and O toward X and toward each other can be either positive or negative. People feel a mental imbalance when they disagree with others whom they like or respect. Thus, people feel cognitive pressure to agree with their friends’ opinions.

…people use rhetoric to overcome their divisions. Relationships between people lead them to care about one another’s opinions and attitudes. People tend to prefer agreement over disagreement, and if a disagreement does arise, people may try to achieve symmetry (i.e., cognitive balance) either by coming to agreement on that issue or by changing the way they feel about each other. In some cases, people also agree to disagree, but Newcomb was skeptical of such resolutions, calling them “relatively stressful states of equilibrium” (1953, p. 401). To understand balance theory and the co-orientation process, imagine two friends who like the same song. They experience cognitive balance (at least in this respect) because their orientation toward a common object is the same. However, if one friend likes the song and the other dislikes it, each friend will experience a degree of cognitive imbalance and feel pressure to resolve the disagreement. They may attempt to change one another’s mind. If either friend is successful at this attempt, balance will be restored. If not, the friends may change their opinion of each other (e.g., they may have less respect for the other’s musical taste). The more serious a disagreement is, the more strain it puts on a relationship…

When two people identify with each other they can achieve cognitive balance by either identifying with or dissociating from a common object (another person, an idea, an action, etc.). By contrast, when one person seeks to identify with an object and the other person seeks to dissociate from that object, those two people cannot identify with each other without creating an imbalance. The tension they feel will exert pressure on them to change their identification with the object or with each other.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on Their Friendship Dissolved Over Monetarism

Decoding The Greatest Motivational Speakers (12-12-23)

01:00 New Yorker: How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker: The upstart motivator Jesse Itzler wants to reform his profession—while also rising to the top, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=153558
53:00 Criticizing Israel on American campuses, https://www.unz.com/isteve/president-of-penn-shoved-out/
55: Putting the con in conservative: https://rumble.com/v2nqqwe-putting-the-con-in-conservative-5-14-23.html
56:00 Conservative cons, https://rumble.com/v2nr3s4-putting-the-con-in-conservative-part-two-5-14-23.html
1:28:00 Leaving Legacy Media, and the Power of New Media and Speaking the Truth, with Tucker Carlson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MjBHb5Q7NI

Posted in Guru | Comments Off on Decoding The Greatest Motivational Speakers (12-12-23)

New Yorker: How to Build a Better Motivational Speaker: The upstart motivator Jesse Itzler wants to reform his profession—while also rising to the top

You don’t become a great motivational speaker ala Oprah and Tony Robbins by telling the truth. There are too many other people and institutions doing that. You become special by relaying something special, but few people have a trove of special ideas. What to do? You harness your talents to relay ideas that sounds profound, like a Dennis Prager or Jordan Peterson.

My favorite motivational speakers are 12-step speakers, but they don’t get written up in major publications. They don’t get wealth, fame and power from their work. Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, was offered an honorary doctorate from Yale but turned it down in accordance with the AA tradition of anonymity.

Twelve-step programs refuse large donations. AA, for example, won’t take more than a few thousands dollars from you, and then only if you were regularly attending AA meetings. They don’t want outside money. How many other groups refuse large donations?

Tad Friend writes for the Dec. 11, 2023 New Yorker:

[Teaching life lessons] was the work of shamans, imams, and ministers. Nowadays, it falls to muscular men in black jeans who prowl the stage: the motivational speakers.

Why do people turn to secular sources of meaning rather than religious sources? Because for many people, secular sources of meaning are more meaningful than religious sources. The biggest reason, for example, that most Jews are not Orthodox Jews is that Orthodox Judaism does not make sense to them.

For some people, their life gets better when they become more religious. For other people, their life gets better when they reduce their religious commitments. Some people improve their lives by following secular gurus and other people diminish their lives.

Just as there is no parenting style that produces results above normal, there’s no program for living that beats the pants off all alternatives. In some situations, following the old ways works best. In other situations, doing things the new way works better. I am sure there are some jobs such as sales that require more motivation than other jobs (where you just follow directions), and therefore thousands of people have a rational demand for motivation gurus. These guys meet a legitimate need while also preying on the vulnerable who would be better off with out.

They know that each of us has a dream life, one that seems as distant as childhood happiness. They make getting to it a matter of discrete steps—believe in your greatness; envision where you want to be in a year; find the window in every wall—and urge you to start taking them.

That doesn’t seem realistic except for the people selling these visions. I bet many of them make good money from retailing nonsense to weak people. What’s the basis for my disdain? The highest paid motivational speakers are Tony Robbins and Oprah. If the highest-paid and most successful members of this profession were admirable, I might change my mind.

Notes Wikipedia:

In 1984, Robbins married Rebecca Jenkins after meeting her at a seminar. Jenkins had three children from two former marriages, whom Robbins adopted. Robbins and Jenkins filed for divorce in 1998.

In 1984, Robbins fathered a child with former girlfriend Liz Acosta. Their son, Jairek Robbins, is also a personal empowerment coach and trainer.

In October 2001, Robbins married Bonnie Sage Humphrey Robbins. They live in Manalapan, Florida.

Robbins was a vegan for 12 years, he then reportedly added fish to his diet. Whilst eating a fish-heavy diet he developed mercury poisoning and nearly died. His diet now consists of mostly vegetables with a small amount of animal protein.

New Yorker:

The first challenge motivational speakers must overcome is that motivation galvanizes people for only about forty-five minutes. The second is banality: it is hardly an esoteric secret that it’s important to set clear goals, embrace opportunities, and persevere through rejection. The third is that “motivational speaker” smacks of quackery. So the motivators now call themselves “inspirational teachers” or “life strategists” or “global experts on human genius and personal transformation.” By transforming their own lives, at least, America’s twenty-five thousand life coaches and growth facilitators have helped make motivation a thirteen-billion-dollar industry.

Motivation outside of your connection to your family and friends and vital interests is usually going to evaporate. We evolved to live tribally. Normal people get all the motivation they need from their family, friends, profession and hobbies. If this normal life is not available to you, there’s probably something wrong that can’t be fixed by motivational speakers. On the other hand, most of us can use a pep talk now and again. Jordan Peterson, for example, helps thousands of people (in addition to hurting thousands of people). Some people can consume this genre with benefit, other people will consume it with mixed results, and other people will consume motivational products to their detriment. There’s no one size fits all variety of self-help.

Transforming your life by selling information products is not an option for most people. I would expect that out of ten thousand who try, only one makes a living from it, and only a minority of them sell something that is honorable.

One evening in June, two hundred and sixty people gathered in a ski lodge at the foot of Bald Mountain, in Sun Valley, Idaho. They had paid almost five thousand dollars to summit Mt. Everest, by analogy. At six o’clock the next morning, they would climb Baldy, take the chairlift down, and repeat, until, after fifteen ascents, they’d climbed 29,029 vertical feet—the elevation of Everest. A company called 29029 Everesting had organized the event and staffed it with inspiring coaches…

Is there any evidence that doing something like this consistently works for people?

Most of these people would be better off paying attention to why they wanted to sign up for such an event in the first place, and then paying attention to how they operated during the event, rather than focusing on achieving the ends of climbing Mount Everest. If you reach this goal, have you done yourself more harm than good or have you summited with grace and ease?

Motivational speakers usually focus people on achieving ends, but pay little attention to what usually matters most — the means.

[Jesse] Itzler, who co-founded 29029 Everesting, is rangy and puckish, and he appears to have plucked his outfits from a college student’s laundry basket. His résumé is all hairpin turns: a former rapper, he wrote the earworm New York Knicks theme song, managed Run-DMC, and launched five successful companies, including a private-plane-rental service, before becoming a part owner of the Atlanta Hawks. Having found his métier in motivation, seven years ago, Itzler is determined to become its leading practitioner. He believes that what we really want is to feel proud of ourselves. His chief method for instilling pride is to set physical challenges so difficult that you must discover something new within yourself to meet them.

He sounds like an extraordinary man. He’s right that we want to feel proud of ourselves. I am sure that setting yourself a physical challenge and meeting that challenge helps people feel better about themselves just as setting yourself communal, professional, educational, mental, psychological, and spiritual challenges and meeting them enhances your reputation with yourself. But none of these things is a shortcut to achieving secure attachment (so that you like yourself and you like to spend time with people who like you and minimize time with people who hurt you).

Overcoming is a staple of motivational speaking: I’m an ordinary person, like you, who overcame cancer/homelessness/getting bitten by a radioactive spider and achieved extraordinary results.

Most people are not going to achieve extraordinary results. The word “extraordinary” means unusual and remarkable. If everyone achieved the extraordinary, the word would have no meaning.

Telling people that they can achieve extraordinary results by following your program is a con. On the other hand, I’m sure that certain people can achieve extraordinary results following certain programs.

Itzler is a fervent believer in competition: after a recent colonoscopy, he asked the doctor, “Do I have the cleanest colon of anyone you’ve ever done?”

I’m sure this hyper-competitive approach to life works well for some people. Most of us enjoy some competition now and again just as most of us enjoy serenity, love and peace.

Do you enjoy hanging out with people who constantly want to compete with you? I find them exhausting.

There’s a time and a place for competition and a time and a place for chilling.

Itzler told me, “What I’m really doing is providing people with a foundation for how to live. I could definitely make this a hundred-million-dollar business, because the category has exploded, and there’s such huge need.”

It’s possible that Itzler knows more about how to live than various traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism and Christianity that have lasted hundreds or even thousands of years, but I’m skeptical.

Itzler seems amazing, so it would not surprise me that he could build a hundred-million-dollar business. If his program consistently provides more value than cost to most people who buy it, that would put him on the right side of the moral ledger.

Yet motivation, like intimacy, is hard to scale. It works best in high-school locker rooms, less well in arenas, and rarely, or barely, on Instagram. Itzler intends to grow with his clients—yet he worries that reaching the summit in his field might prove incompatible with becoming his best self. “This space is filled with a lot of people regurgitating what other people have been saying for years, a lot of predatory marketing, a lot of snake oil,” he said. “Everybody says they’re not in it for the money, but everybody’s in it for the money.”

Being in it for the money (while following the law and not operating in an underhanded way) seems to me like the best possible motive compared to the common alternatives such as seeking attention and sexual conquests.

The American experiment has always been defined by the pursuit of happiness.

For most people, their motivation is for themselves and for their posterity (as stated in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution).

Self-help itself recently got an upgrade to “personal development.” It’s no longer the remedial training you undergo to quit smoking but a personal-brand refresh to catapult you into the C-suite. Every weekend, around the country, conferences attract aspirants eager to flip houses, or sell solar panels, or just get rich in some unspecified way. The conference-goers, mostly in their thirties and forties, have the air of commuters who missed the first train to the city and are determined to crowd onto the next one. They seek trade secrets and, better still, the mind-set to deploy them. Kent Clothier, who runs a conference called Scale and Escape, told me, “Whatever you’re doing—real estate or marketing or athletics—personal development is the foundation.”

This personal development builds upon the rickety foundation that predisposes isolated people to seek personal development.

Fleyshman described a pyramid of access, in which you upsell adherents and then sell them back down, keeping them continually engaged. “Start by selling something cheap—a paid newsletter, weekly coaching on Zoom,” he said. “Once you have their credit card, they’re in the funnel. Then you invite them to your conference and upsell into the V.I.P. and Super V.I.P. tickets.” People pay to be closer to the source of inspiration. A backstage pass might cost ten thousand dollars. A “mastermind” program—group-coaching sessions led by the motivator, often in an exotic locale—could be twenty-five thousand more. As Clothier told me, those who keep paying to get to the next level “are trying to compress time and go faster, the same way people pay more to get to the front of the line at Disney World.”

You are selling to people who feel like they are missing something in life. These are not normal people. They’re vulnerable.

Top speakers on the conference circuit make between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars for a talk, with a handful nearer to four hundred thousand dollars. Oprah, who’s on her own planet, charges a minimum of a million. Nearly all motivators espouse taking risks, serving others, and being grateful, but the most successful offer ready-made fixes for impediments to change—the fear of failure or embarrassment, the inexorable claims of inertia. Fleyshman told me, “People want to learn how to do everything, which is why they come to these conferences—only it turns out they don’t want to do anything. That’s why so many pitches from the stage are ‘Done for you’—we’ll build your Web site, or run your S.E.O.”

If Oprah is number one in your field, than your field has little to do with truth.

If you are selling people a way to get rich by doing nothing, then you are selling a con.

By contrast, the 12-step teaching is that it works if you work it, and it doesn’t work if you don’t work it. There’s no 12-step recovery without work.

He spoke about [his son] Lazer deciding to play baseball at age twelve, despite having no experience. (Itzler assured me, “I run anything I want to use by Lazer beforehand, and he feels like a superstar when he hears stories about himself.”)

…After a typical day at home, he told one audience, “Fifteen lessons happened to me in twenty-four hours!”

For most people, it will feel like they’re selling their soul when much of their public speaking relies upon telling stories about their family. There’s nothing inherently wrong in making a living talking about intimate parts of your life, it’s just not a good formula for most people. It usually won’t create a life that works (a life where you consistently look forward to the day ahead).

[Rony Robbins] now gets a minimum of five hundred thousand dollars to speak, and charges personal-coaching clients a million dollars a year, plus a cut of their profits. But he is best known for his events, such as the lavishly produced Unleash the Power Within, which promises “four days of completely rewiring your nervous system to attract overwhelming abundance in every area of your life!”

Large group awareness training is dangerous:

Psychologist Chris Mathe has written in the interests of consumer-protection, encouraging potential attendees of LGATs to discuss such trainings with any current therapist or counselor, to examine the principles underlying the program, and to determine pre-screening methods, the training of facilitators, the full cost of the training and of any suggested follow-up care.[20] One study noted the many difficulties in evaluating LGATs, from proponents’ explicit rejection of certain study models to difficulty in establishing a rigorous control group.[22] In some cases, organizations under study have partially funded research into themselves.[4]

Not all professional researchers view LGATs favorably. Researchers such as psychologist Philip Cushman,[24] for example, found that the program he studied “consists of a pre-meditated attack on the self”. A 1983 study on Lifespring[5] found that “although participants often experience a heightened sense of well-being as a consequence of the training, the phenomenon is essentially pathological”, meaning that, in the program studied, “the training systematically undermines ego functioning and promotes regression to the extent that reality testing is significantly impaired”. Lieberman’s 1987 study,[4] funded partially by Lifespring, noted that 5 out of a sample of 289 participants experienced “stress reactions” including one “transitory psychotic episode”.

New Yorker:

Robbins popularized the belief that the mind follows where the body leads. In between his curative “interventions,” he has the audience jump and clap and sway and shout along, harmonizing their systems with his. “I burn eleven thousand three hundred calories a day onstage,” Robbins told me. “They measured my bone density and I’m stronger than 99.9 per cent of the population, and I have the lean body mass of a lineman. What happens in my body—and in the audience’s, because everything in their bodies matches mine, down to the heartbeats—is that testosterone surges through the roof. So now you’re so focused that you retain whatever you’re learning.”

He really should do something about his hoarse voice.

Workouts increase discipline and energy, produce measurable improvements, and make you look ripped.

The way most people work out ingrains bad habits. Some of them would be better off not working out and just going for a nice walk with a friend.

Itzler has no patience for motivators whose message is “Be young and buff like me.” He says he wouldn’t have had anything to tell people before he’d had failures and successes as an entrepreneur; before he got married and had kids; before he built a repository of wisdom. Yet his obsession with fitness led him into the field, and it defines his brand.

There’s no objective test for wisdom.

To many rudderless men who feel at sea, toxic masculinity seems like a safe harbor.

For everybody who feels broken, there’s a guru waiting to make you feel whole.

Itzler’s masculinity is relatively evolved, but he does dwell on grievances. When a lone detractor called him “pampered” in a reply to Itzler’s Instagram post about an Ultraman (perhaps because he’d brought a team of six to film, hydrate, and Theragun him), Itzler groused about it for weeks: “I will never forget that!”

He didn’t forget it because the remark rang true.

When we’re called by our name, we answer.

Itzler turns nearly everything into a game, a contest, a chance to measure yourself. He and Blakely agree that if one of their children says, “I can’t,” they reply, “Itzlers don’t say that.”

There’s no evidence that this is a superior way of raising children.

His home is an incubator for optimization. Itzler recently told an audience, “I said to my brother about my son, ‘He’s a good swimmer, but he doesn’t really have that eye of the tiger,’ and my brother said, ‘That’s O.K., as long as he’s happy.’ ” There were murmurs of approval. “And I’m, like, ‘No! He’d be happy playing Fortnite and eating Häagen-Dazs every night. We want him to live up to his potential.’ ”

Sounds exhausting. In the end, it doesn’t much matter what you want for your kids. They’re going to do their own thing and they’re going to be more influenced by their peers than by you. Your best chance for influencing them is by choosing where they go to school and where you live and worship. Through these methods you can predispose them towards a particular peer group. I remember in my Pacific Union College Elementary School, my sixth grade class was filled with good kids while the fifth grade class was filled with troubled kids. I was lucky I got to hang with the good kids.

Itzler has a parental knack for infusing you with his intentions. You simply take it on faith that those intentions will behoove you.

Sometimes they will and sometimes they won’t. In general, you don’t want to put your life in the hands of gurus.

Motivators, like parents, don’t so much instruct you as remind you of good habits. Yet, if you ask ten motivators which habits are effective, you’ll get twenty ideas. Lewis Howes, who has interviewed more than a thousand leaders in personal development on his podcast, “School of Greatness,” asks each one for “three truths.” Howes told me, “My takeaway is that it comes down to ‘Love a lot. Love people, love life, love yourself.’ ” But if people were able to do all that, unprompted, they wouldn’t need the conference at the Marriott.

The “If books could kill” podcast has great critiques of airport best sellers such as The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, The 48 Laws of Power, The 4-Hour Workweek, The Rules, Atomic Habits, “Nudge”: A Simple Solution For Littering, Organ Donations and Climate Change, The Five Love Languages, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Coddling Of The American Mind, Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, The Secret, The Game, Outliers, and Freakanomics.

In the Atomic Habits episode, cohost Michael Hobbes says: “This is the fundamental tension of all self-help books — there’s very little advice you can give to everyone. And it’s all been said before.”

Cohost Peter Shamshiri: “I say it is pseudo-scientific because… there is no science he cites to back it up. What he cites is a tweet. It is one of several citations to tweet. The tweet is one tweet in a tweet thread about other stuff. There are citations to tweets and Reddit posts throughout the book.”

Hobbes: “You can’t debunk these things. It is not clear that they are true or untrue. They are just a way of looking at things.”

Shamshiri: “He’s just speculating. You’re just saying it. Where’s the science? What’s the explanation?”

Hobbes: “If that helps you, great, but it is not scientific or generalizable.”

“Motivational rise-and-grind books are written by people who are high-functioning. Somebody with a lot of energy, super extroverted, love planning things, loving having everything neat and in order, and people like this go through the world confused — why don’t you just do what I’m doing?”

“People who get a lot of satisfaction about being organized are the worst people to give advice. There’s a human tendency to chalk this up to my system. But this is a function of their personality. It’s something they enjoy dedicating themselves to. You can’t tell people — you should enjoy doing the dishes immediately when you are done eating.”

Shamshiri: “There’s a great paradox to this book. It pitches itself as a way to organize your life, but the book itself is disorganized, chaotic, and rambling. There are pieces of useful advice but you can only get that after sifting through unnecessary anecdotes, unsourced scientific claims, and contradictions and fabrications. Reading it was an experience similar to using social media — at the end of it I had a headache, I was tired, but I had two new habits, and it wasn’t worth it. This stuff works very well for some people, a little bit for others and not for others as well.”

Hobbes: “The core problem of these things is that you cannot meaningfully help people unless you understand the specifics of their situation.”

New Yorker:

The consensus in the field, to the extent that there is one, is that to create new habits you need motivation plus mind-set plus a methodology. Itzler believes the best way to start that process is by “building your life résumé.” He asks followers to fill out a wall-size “Big A## Calendar,” which he sells for forty-seven dollars. Schedule in mini-adventures every two months, build a winning habit (such as cutting out added sugar) every quarter, and, most important, frame your year around a misogi. In Japanese, the word describes a purification ritual, but in Itzler’s parlance a misogi is a daunting challenge that forces growth.

Goals are good, but the downside to chasing goals is that you narrow your vision and get tempted into making shortcuts.

He studies other speakers, constantly comparing, tweaking, seeking to improve. He told me, “I want to make someone feel bad they came before me and terrible they went after me.” His peers are no less competitive. The motivator Erwin McManus told me, “I was in a room full of great speakers recently, and they were all asking each other, ‘Who’s the greatest communicator in the world?’ I said, ‘Maybe the question should instead be “What do people most need to hear?” ’ ” McManus, who coaches other speakers, rates his clients on a personality test called the Birkman Method. “They’re all in the nineties out of a hundred, where the higher the number, the more you’re affected by how other people perceive you,” he said. “They all have a deep conviction that their message is the most important one. And that message, so often, is ‘Don’t care what other people think about you.’”

You should care, moderately, what other people think of you because you need to keep connection and you need information (other people might be seeing things more clearly than you do or conducting themselves more effectively). There’s no way to graduate from comparing yourself to others, but you can do it in an adaptive way (for connection and information) or in a maladaptive way (for social destruction or self-destruction).

Itzler disparages the measures of success in his industry—griping that you have to pay up to ten thousand dollars to be included on certain lists of top coaches, and that numerous colleagues “claim they have the top-rated podcast or bring in a hundred million dollars—all this uncheckable hype!” But he still wants to reach the top. Once, when we were discussing his coaching program, he laughed and said, “The bitterness you hear is that I haven’t been able to crack the code and get to a higher level.”

…When Itzler and Wintonick met recently to discuss revamping their programs for next year, Itzler declared, “This industry is built on predatory advertising that tells you your life is broken. ‘If you feel you haven’t lived up to your potential’—which is everyone!—‘the only way to achieve that is to take my ninety-nine-dollar program, and I’ll teach you how to get a private jet.’ To promise someone a free Webinar, and then bombard them with e-mails for all these other products, that’s horseshit—”

Wintonick interrupted to point out that their media team sends a flood of e-mails, too. Itzler looked stricken. “ ‘If you like that, we also have this’ is completely different from ‘We’re offering this free Webinar only so we can upsell you into our nine-hundred-and-ninety-seven-dollar program,’ ” he protested.

The key word here is predatory. The key product here is hope.

When you buy the program, you buy hope.

Whatever conventional wisdom recommends, Itzler is inclined to reject; one of his Webinars is called “Normal Is Broken” (normal, he points out, is overweight, divorced, and depressed).

If a guru simply repeats establishment wisdom, he’s unnecessary. He’s not special.

The Gurometer is “not a scientific instrument, not a psychometric scale, not a revolutionary theory” but an analysis developed by psychologist Matt Browne and cognitive anthropologist Chris Kavanagh who started the podcast Decoding the Gurus in 2020. It notes:

It is necessary that the orthodoxy, the establishment, the mainstream media, and the expert-consensus are always wrong, or at least blinkered and limited, and are generally incapable of grappling with the real issues. In the rare occasions when they are right, they are described by the gurus as being right for reasons other than they think. Kavanagh has coined the term ‘science-hipsterism’ which captures this tendency quite nicely. A guru can seldom agree with the establishment, because it is crucial to their appeal that they are offering unique insight – a fresh hot take that is not available elsewhere, and may be repressed or taboo. The guru’s popularity will obviously benefit, if this iconoclastic view happens to coincide with their prejudices or intuitions of their lay-followers. Thus, gurus are naturally drawn to topics where there is a split between the expert consensus and public opinion (e.g. climate change, GMOs, vaccinations, lockdowns). After all, if a guru is merely agreeing with an expert consensus on a topic such as COVID, then there is less reason to listen to the guru rather than the relevant experts. Thus, the guru is highly motivated to undertake epistemic sabotage; to disparage authoritative and institutional sources of knowledge. There is a tradeoff where the more the guru’s followers distrust standard sources of knowledge, such as that emanating from universities, the greater the perceived value that the guru provides. This tendency is at odds with the guru’s natural tendency towards self-aggrandisement, which may involve emphasising or inflating their (even limited) academic intellectual recognition, which results in some amusing contradictions. Gurus will also strategically utilise ambiguity and uncertainty within their criticisms, providing themselves with the means to walk back claims that prove wrong or attract criticism or to enable them to highlight disclaimers. This provides them both with plausible deniability and the superficial appearance of having nuance & humility. This dynamic of sabotaging other sources of wisdom is also evident in their fractious relationships with other gurus, with whom they may often have alliances of convenience, but are also strongly incentivised to compete with.

Back to The New Yorker:

He has spoken at five Tony Robbins events. He has a full-time staffer who shoots video of him and posts clips on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram. And he currently has an online calendar club ($1,000); the Elite365 program, which provides coaching in such categories as business, nutrition, intermittent fasting, parenting, and mind-set, as well as quarterly calls and two retreats with Itzler ($35,000); and the Premier365 program, which offers even more coaching and face time ($75,000).

Kaching!

Erwin McManus, who’s also a pastor, told me, “This space has exploded with the loss of faith in organized religion. You can’t look at optimizing human potential and not feel it as a deeply spiritual calling.”

Are these gurus optimizing for truth?

The motivational experience mirrors going to church—the catechistic phrases, the stand-and-testify choreography, the joy of gathering with fellow-believers…

Even as he encourages people to pattern their lives on his, he fears the responsibility of becoming a role model. Two people in his program have asked him to bail them out of jail, and others have sought his counsel because they’re contemplating divorce, or suicide. “I’m a pleaser, I get energy from people, I’m not a therapist,” he told me, his eyes wide with alarm…

Where therapy leads to self-knowledge, and religion offers grace, motivation valorizes success. Its foundational premise is that life has a secret plan for you, and the motivator has acquired a copy. Dean Graziosi, who leads programs with Tony Robbins, recently said in a video aimed at potential enrollees, “If you’ve got the blueprint, and you keep trying, isn’t it a fact that you will succeed?”

Decoding the Gurus focuses on “the subset of gurus who make liberal use of ‘pseudo profound bullshit’ referring to speech that is persuasive and creates the appearance of profundity with little regard for truth or reference to relevant expertise.”

New Yorker:

In this reassuring view, setbacks don’t happen to you, they happen for you, so you can grow. But, if persistence guarantees success, then when you fail it’s entirely on you. You flunked life. This belief has powerful social consequences: governments and companies have no duty of care, because everyone should take care of himself. Zig Ziglar once told A.T. & T. employees facing a round of layoffs, “Don’t blame the boss—work harder and pray more.” This belief also has implications for family dynamics. Mylett warns audiences that, if you don’t become a superlative provider, you’re telling your family, “I was more scared than I loved you.”

There are advantages to this worldview and disadvantages.

Itzler is remarkably free of fear. He occasionally wakes at 3 a.m. worrying about his mother, or his children—yet his confidence in his own luck defends him against vulnerability. “It’s hard to get Jesse to explain the deeper meaning of all this, even to a close friend,” his childhood schoolmate Kenny Reisman said, at Hell on the Hill. “Maybe it’s the Mrs. Itz in him, the stoic underneath.” The promise of motivation is, If I do exactly what you do, I’ll be you. But what Itzler’s clients hope to emulate may simply be the charisma he was born with.

It’s easy to be free of fear, or to at least give the impression that you are free of fear, when life is going well for you. But we never graduate from vulnerability.

Dr. Stephen Marmer said on Dennis Prager’s radio show Feb. 21, 2010: “We work and rework all of the main challenges of development. Every time we do it, we can add to our happiness and reduce our unhappiness because we get another shot at working at a problem that has come up in the past and will come up again in the future. No problem is ever solved 100%.

“Imagine you are climbing a spiral staircase in the tower and at each vista, there’s a window. You get to see the fields from a different angle.

“There are four basic developmental challenges — dependency, mastery, grandiosity and feeling small in a big world.

“You will face these challenges over and over again.

“We will experience these windows one way in childhood, another way in adolescence, another way in early adulthood…and another way in the geriatric phase.

“When you’re feeling dependent, remember when you had mastery. When you’re feeling grandiose, remember when you were feeling small in a big world.”

“It’s a recipe for balance and for not feeling overwhelmed by any of these four stages because each one of them modifies the other.”

New Yorker:

Blakely told me, “As his wife, I would like to have conversations about feelings with Jesse. For years, I’d say, ‘How do you feel?’ and he would say, ‘I don’t know,’ and I’d get mad. And one day I realized, He doesn’t know. I gradually discovered that he could write his deeper feelings to me, or talk about them if we went on a walk together—he’s so much better in motion. I’ve thought about this issue a lot, having been with him for sixteen years, and I feel like he’s just happy.”

Different people are born with different baseline levels of happiness. We didn’t evolve to be happy. We evolved to survive.

But Itzler quieted the applause to show a video of him in the I.C.U., not long before his father died, putting his phone to his father’s ear and playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a favorite of his. “Time is going to take everything away from you,” he said. “But—I mean this wholeheartedly—it can’t take away what’s in your soul.” Onscreen, Dan Itzler smiled and began tapping his foot, a light flickering on in a nearly abandoned house. Dee Wiz cut the hymn, but the audience kept singing: “His truth is marching on. . . .”

Most people have the ability to get on the same page with others, though it is easier to do this if you have things in common. When we connect, we create energy. If we just march with people, or pray with people, or work with people, we’ll likely bond with them and start to care for them. It’s a good way to live.

If Jesse Itzler wants to reform his profession, he should send out an email saying “Do not buy my products.” Then he should explain that some people are likely to be better off not buying his stuff just as there are some people who are likely to be better off buying his stuff. For example, losers should probably overcome their addictions and get their lives together via almost free methods such as 12-step programs, pay off their debts, and from a secure base of a flourishing life they can then make better decisions whether or not to spend money to up their motivation. If you have disabling problem with credit cards or alcohol or sex, you can find nearly-free help through programs such as AA and SLAA (Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous) and DA (Debtors Anonymous). Get sober before you start spending on my stuff, Jesse should say. He should outline the type of person who likely benefits from his programs — a high performer who wants to get even higher, a six-figure sales guy who wants more, a successful entrepreneur who has dreams.

Tony Robbins should do something like this too. Any self-respecting success-selling sales guy should have the integrity to point out that many people should not buy what they’re selling. “Don’t subscribe to my emails if you don’t already earn six figures!” would be a good start. “Some people are better off not subscribing to me!” would be an important message. Just as some people can’t handle one drink or one bite of ice cream without triggering a craving, some people should not open themselves up to the temptation of buying hope and success. Just as betting ads contain prominent messaging about how to get help for your gambling addiction, success salesmen should promote responsible messaging about getting help for your buying addiction.

I’ve read over 200 self-help books in my life. I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of Tony Robbins talks and other self-help material. Until I got sober in various 12-step programs for emotional addiction, self-help did me little good.

In 2008 and 2009, as I was sinking deeper into credit card debt, I spent over $12,000 on success programs. Some things I learned in these programs were essential for a gig I got over the next five years that earned me about $75,000 for modest effort. Two years ago, I spent $500 for an online program about health. I don’t know if it was worth it.

Over the last 13 years, I’ve spent less than $100 on success programs. In fact, I can only recall one $7 purchase.

Some people are better off not watching my live streams. You can be a good guy and not be good for everyone. Jesse Itzler types should let the world know that many people are better off without them. Some intense people are not a good fit for other people. They can overwhelm them.

For some people, I’m poison and for other people I’m a pleasant addition.

The Gurometer has relevant insights about secular gurus:

* Galaxy-brainness is an ironic descriptor of someone who presents ideas that appear to be too profound for an average mind to comprehend, but are in truth reasonably trivial if not nonsensical. Gurus often present themselves as fonts of wisdom, and it is an all-encompassing kind of knowledge that tends to span multiple disciplines and topics. Their arguments often link together disparate concepts, such as quantum mechanics, logic, and the nature of consciousness. A guru will often present themselves as a polymath, who can offer novel insights with reference to many different fields.

* Being a guru is a social role: a guru is only a guru if there are people who regard them as such! How gurus interact with their followers and critics, their in-group and out-group, is often quite revealing. Gurus are not usually bonafide cult-leaders. However, the social groups they cultivate — often with themselves positioned as intellectual leaders — can have some elements reminiscent of cultish dynamics. A key characteristic of cults is the establishment of clear in-group and out-group identities, primarily between the cult-members/admirers and outsiders. However, there will often be internal discriminations made within the cult, such as between an inner-circle of favoured members, the broader normal members, and problematic or troublesome members (who may need to be reprimanded, temporarily excluded, or exorcised). In general, cultish behaviour is characterized by emotional manipulation and control.
We’ve noticed that gurus tend to act in a manipulative fashion with their followers and potential allies. This often takes the form of excessive flattery, such as intimations that their followers are more perceptive, more morally worthy, and more interested in the pursuit of truth than outsiders. A guru will often put some effort into signalling a close and personal relationship with their followers — essentially encouraging the development of parasocial ideation. Praise and regard for the guru is usually reciprocated, whilst disagreement or criticism is usually dismissed as coming from an unworthy person who does not truly understand the significance of the guru’s ideas.

* A cult will generally have more than a few bones to pick with supposedly nefarious forces in the outside world. Likewise, fascist organisations will derive much energy from narratives of grievance focused on specific out-groups. Feelings of frustration and oppression, being excluded and disregarded, and deprived of one’s manifest rights and recognitions, represent a potent set of negative emotions. Gurus too, will sometimes rely on narratives of grievance pertaining to themselves and their potential followers in order to drive engagement. After all, a worldview in which all is essentially fair and just is not one that will encourage people to search for alternative ways in which to view the world.

Gurus sometimes also engage in personal grievance narratives. These are especially convenient, in that they not only encourage emotional connection and sympathy for the guru, but they provide a convenient explanation for why someone of their unique talents has not been well-supported or given the recognition they deserve by the outside world. They also relate to conspiratorial ideation (discussed more below), in explaining why the special ideas and perspectives shared with followers have not been recognised and accepted by the outside world. It is because their ideas have been suppressed by malevolent and powerful actors for selfish reasons.

* It is almost impossible to be a guru without having a sense of grandiosity and inflated idea of one’s self-importance. The role of being a guru involves cultivating praise and attention, and demands a certain level of charisma and charm. Another trait of narcissists is a belief in one’s uniqueness, and that only special people can appreciate them. It is therefore not surprising that one tends to see other narcissistic traits in gurus, such as having a very thin skin when it comes to criticism, or expecting that the world should be recognising one’s talents far more than it does. Our tentative hypothesis is that narcissism is the key personality trait of gurus. People without at least some degree of over-confidence and attention-seeking will find the role of guru very uncomfortable and eschew it, even if it is thrust upon them. People who are not narcissistic, but with genuine expertise and insight in a given domain, may find the spotlight an unwelcome distraction. People ‘on the spectrum’ of narcissism, however, will find any attention and regard highly satisfying, and this is the motivating factor for engaging in going beyond whatever talents they may have, to engage in the pseudo-profound bullshitting techniques described here. The lack of self-awareness common among narcissists also seems to explain why gurus seem to ‘believe their own bullshit’. Just as a narcissist loves themselves, they are in love with their own ideas, and may be incapable of seeing the degree to which they are bullshit.

* Connected with their narcissism and worthiness of being a guru, they are greatly attracted to claiming that they have developed game-changing and paradigm-shifting intellectual products. This is, in a sense, the credentials and the resume of a guru.

* Gurus perhaps desire respect and admiration above all else, but they also tend to feel that more worldly and tangible recognition of their talents is appropriate. Accordingly, gurus may be surprisingly willing to undertake activities such as shilling health supplements, that would otherwise be a little surprising in an intellectual of their calibre. Note that it is natural and reasonable for any intellectual worker or content creator to be compensated for their effort. Thus, book royalties, YouTube advertising royalties, or the insertion of standard advertising in a podcast does not usually or necessarily indicate grifting. However, gurus tend to go somewhat further in an effort to monetise their following, while avoiding the appearance of such – which would detract from their guru status.

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