Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
(This is a reposting of posts from two and seven years ago. Unhappily, this post’s themes are more relevant than ever. The Internet seems to be changing human social relations, business, politics and civil society in significant ways not all of which are clear. Perhaps the nature of what is happening will be better understood with time.)
—-
Crazy, overconfident; the opposite of the judicious, scientific, skeptical temperament.
Extreme opinions.
Stubborn.
Bombastic.
The opposite of thoughtful.
To the surprise of practically no one outside the Establishment Mainstream Media and a handful of social justice race-warriors who live to perpetuate the ‘White Americans Are Teh Most Raaaaacist Evah!’ meme, the Jussie Smallett racial beat-down-and-bleach soaking has been confirmed by local law enforcement as a put-up job, arranged and paid for by the so-called victim … who, whatever his talents as an actor, has absolutely no skill for creating a convincing narrative, never mind coming up with convincing verisimilitude and corroborative detail required of a snow-job like this. That’s because he is an actor, I surmise not a writer or a skilled political operative. Hiring a pair of body-building Nigerian brothers to do that particular deed … I guess it’s true there are jobs that ordinary Americans just won’t do.
2018–The Year of Living Hatefully is the title of a recent post by Roger Simon:
Practically no one was happy. Or if they were, they didn’t show it. All they wanted to do was vilify the opposition or even their neighbors. Democrats hating Republicans (see the new movie “Vice”) and vice versa were just the tip of a rancid iceberg. Never Trumpers hate Trumpers and the reverse, Sanders supporters hate Beto supporters, Antifa hate the bourgeoisie, the Proud Boys hate Antifa, FOX hates CNN and MSNBC hates FOX…It goes on and on. Families and friends split from each other. People shut up at work for fear they’ll be fired. Thanksgiving is a festival of hostility, Christmas (when we’re allowed to speak its name) is only slightly better.
Roger attributes the toxic atmosphere in large part to the decline in religiousness. I’m not convinced by that explanation; there are plenty of examples of religion as a cause of mutual hostility as well as cases where it has served as part of a cure.
One factor in the development of the toxic atmosphere, IMO, has been the cult of “self-esteem development” carried to an excess…this seems to have resulted in a large number of people who simply cannot stand challenge or disagreement.
Still, there are plenty are angry and hostile people who are old enough to have missed the era of self-esteem indoctrination.
Another factor is social media,which seems to lend itself to the formation of on-line lynch mobs, as I discussed in my post freedom, the village, and social media.
Economic fear and uncertainty surely also plays a role. Although Roger remarks that “all this (craziness and anger) is happening in a country awash in affluence, also as almost never before, with close to full employment for all ethnic and racial groups,” it remains true that many people are highly disappointed in their failure to advance more economically, and many who feel that their children will be less-well-off than themselves. Economic factors aside, there are also many who have been severely disappointed in their relationships and blame this disappointment in large part on society.
A friend of mine once remarked that “if someone is bitter, then he is publicly announcing that in his own eyes he is a failure.” I thought this was a profound comment, and by that measure, there are a lot of people in America today who consider themselves to be failures.
But still, there are a lot of people who are doing very well economically, who seem to have excellent relationships/family lives, but who also have a lot of anger at a large number of their fellow Americans.
Also, I remember something Ralph Peters wrote many years ago:
Man loves, men hate. While individual men and women can sustain feelings of love over a lifetime toward a parent or through decades toward a spouse, no significant group in human history has sustained an emotion that could honestly be characerized as love. Groups hate. And they hate well…Love is an introspective emotion, while hate is easily extroverted…We refuse to believe that the “civilized peoples of the Balkans could slaughter each other over an event that occurred over six hundred years ago. But they do. Hatred does not need a reason, only an excuse.
This also is, I think, a profound remark. And today’s intense focus on group identities has surely led to much more viewing of people as avatars of a group, rather than individuals–making it that much easier to despise and attack them.
And a significant part of American academia is endlessly busy manufacturing new and revised group identities, and stirring up resentments based thereon.
Do you agree with Roger that 2018 was the most Hateful year in recent history? If so, what do you see as the primary causes and the potential remedies, if any?
Via Grim, an interesting post at the Federalist: Our Culture War Is Between People Who Get Results And Empty Suits With Pristine Credentials.
Subtitle: Donald Trump declines the authority of the cultural sectors that most assertively claim it. That’s the real conflict going on.
I’m reminded of an interchange that took place between Picasso and Matisse as the German Army advanced through France in 1940. Monet was shocked to learn that the enemy had already reached Reims. “But what about our generals?” asked Matisse. “What are they doing.”
Picasso’s response: “Well, there you have it, my friend. It’s the Ecole des Beaux-Arts”
…ie, formalists who had learned one set of rules and were not interested in considering deviations from same.
It was an astute remark, and it fits very well with the observations of Andre Beaufre, who before the invasion had been a young captain on the French General Staff. Although he had initially been thrilled to be placed among this elevated circle…
I saw very quickly that our seniors were primarily concerned with forms of drafting. Every memorandum had to be perfect, written in a concise, impersonal style, and conforming to a logical and faultless planbut so abstract that it had to be read several times before one could find out what it was about…”I have the honour to inform you that I have decided…I envisage…I attach some importance to the fact that…” Actually no one decided more than the barest minimum, and what indeed was decided was pretty trivial.
The consequences of that approach became clear in May 1940.
In addition to the formalism that Picasso hypothesized (and Beaufre observed) on the French General Staff, the civilian side of the French government was highly credential-oriented. From the linked article:
In the first days of July, 1940, the American diplomat Robert Murphy took up his duties as the chargé d’affaires at the new U.S. embassy in Vichy, France. Coming from his recent post in Paris, he was as impressed as he expected to be by the quality of the Vichy mandarinate, a highly credentialed class of sophisticated officials who were “products of the most rigorous education and curricula in any public administration in the world.”
As the historian Robert Paxton would write, French officials were “the elite of the elite, selected through a daunting series of relentless examinations for which one prepared at expensive private schools.” In July 1940, the elite of the elite governed the remains of their broken nation, a few days after Adolf Hitler toured Paris as its conqueror. Credentials were the key to holding public office, but not the key to success at the country’s business.
It certainly appears that the current protests and riots in France are at least in part due to long-simmering resentment at that country’s credentialed class, whose performance has not matched their pretensions. An interesting anecdote about Macron, in the Sunday Express:
This is a man who chastised a teenager at an official event for calling him “Manu” (the friendly diminutive of Emmanuel), saying that he should not express a view until he has acquired a degree and a job.
and
Macron is a graduate of the Ecole Normale d’administration (ENA), an elite Grande Ecole created by General De Gaulle in 1945 to break the upper class control of top Civil Service positions.
In reality, only nine percent of ENA the graduates that fill the corridors of power in industry and government have a working class background. The top 12 or 15 students will move to L’Inspection générale des finances (IGF), and then into a career in politics, or finance, Macron’s chosen route since he became a partner with Rothschild and Cie bank.
Americans should not feel smug about our relatively-lesser obsession with credentials. I’ve previously quoted something Peter Drucker wrote in 1969:
One thing it (modern society) cannot afford in education is the “elite institution” which has a monopoly on social standing, on prestige, and on the command positions in society and economy. Oxford and Cambridge are important reasons for the English brain drain. A main reason for the technology gap is the Grande Ecole such as the Ecole Polytechnique or the Ecole Normale. These elite institutions may do a magnificent job of education, but only their graduates normally get into the command positions. Only their faculties “matter.” This restricts and impoverishes the whole society…The Harvard Law School might like to be a Grande Ecole and to claim for its graduates a preferential position. But American society has never been willing to accept this claim…
and
It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the strength of American higher education lies in this absence of schools for leaders and schools for followers. It is almost impossible to explain to a European that the engineer with a degree from North Idaho A. and M. is an engineer and not a draftsman.
We as a country are a lot closer to accepting Grande Ecole status for Harvard Law School and similar institutions than we were when Drucker wrote the above. We haven’t gone as far as France and other European nations, but the trend has clearly been in the wrong direction.
Elections coming.
Bad or worse – not good or bad –
Is the real question.
—-
New Google inbox
Maximizes confusion.
But, Google knows best.
—-
Social media:
People at each other’s throats
Over little things.
—-
That damned noise again. . .
Some app, can’t ID which one.
This is the future?
—-
(Feel free to add your contributions in the comments.)