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.
A man’s admiration of absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him
–Alexis de Tocqueville, from the preface to his The Old Regime and the (French) Revolution.
Translations of this passage differ: the one quoted above is from this version. A different translation renders the phrase as “contempt for one’s country.” The actual French phrase used in the original is son pays. Either way, the point is pretty similar.
Previous Worth Pondering post.
The Paris-based writer Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry said (on X) that he “casually mentioned to an educated American that the Vichy Regime was voted into power by a left-majority Assembly and most of its political personnel was left-wing, while the Free French were overwhelmingly right-wing reactionaries, and he was totally stunned. I thought I was stating the obvious.”
The mention of Vichy reminded me of this series, set in the (fictional) French town of Villeneuve during the years of the German occupation and afterwards, which ran on French TV from 2009-2017. It is simply outstanding–one of the best television series I have ever seen.
Daniel Larcher is a physician who also serves as deputy mayor, a largely honorary position. When the regular mayor disappears after the German invasion, Daniel finds himself mayor for real. His wife Hortense, a selfish and emotionally-shallow woman, is the opposite of helpful to Daniel in his efforts to protect the people of Villaneuve from the worst effects of the occupation while still carrying on his medical practice. Daniel’s immediate superior in his role as mayor is Deputy Prefect Servier, a bureaucrat mainly concerned about his career and about ensuring that everything is done according to proper legal form.
The program is ‘about’ the intersection of ultimate things…the darkest evil, the most stellar heroism….with the ‘dailyness’ of ordinary life, and about the human dilemmas that exist at this intersection. Should Daniel have taken the job of mayor in the first place?…When is it allowable to collaborate with evil, to at least some degree, in the hope of minimizing the damage? Which people will go along, which will resist, which will take advantage? When is violent resistance…for example, the killing by the emerging Resistance of a more or less random German officer…justified, when it will lead to violent retaliation such as the taking and execution of hostages?
Arthur Koestler has written about ‘the tragic and the trivial planes’ of life. As explained by his friend, the writer and fighter pilot Richard Hillary:
“K has a theory for this. He believes there are two planes of existence which he calls vie tragique and vie triviale. Usually we move on the trivial plane, but occasionally in moments of elation or danger, we find ourselves transferred to the plane of the vie tragique, with its non-commonsense, cosmic perspective. When we are on the trivial plane, the realities of the other appear as nonsenseas overstrung nerves and so on. When we live on the tragic plane, the realities of the other are shallow, frivolous, frivolous, trifling. But in exceptional circumstances, for instance if someone has to live through a long stretch of time in physical danger, one is placed, as it were, on the intersection line of the two planes; a curious situation which is a kind of tightrope-walking on one’s nerves…I think he is right.”
In this series, the Tragic and the Trivial planes co-exist…day-to-day life intermingles with world-historical events. And the smallness of the stage…the confinement of the action to a single small village….works well dramatically, for the same reason that (as I have argued previously) stories set on shipboard can be very effective.
Some of the other characters in the series:
An interesting article by neuroscientist Orli Peter:
Across the Middle East, militant groups from Hamas to the Syrian rebels orchestrate calculated psychological operations. Seen from a clinical point of view, they demonstrate exceptional skills in cognitive empathy, which they use to manipulate our emotions.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to accurately understand and model the thoughts, feelings and values of others. It’s like hacking into someone else’s algorithm for how they think and feel, enabling you to predict their reactions to your actions. On the other hand, emotional empathy – what the West excessively values – is the ability to feel what you believe the other person is experiencing.
Cognitive empathy takes effort to construct, whereas emotional empathy is involuntary. Anti-Israel militants have been able to turbo-charge their propaganda by using their cognitive empathy to manipulate Westerner’s emotional empathy.
Using cognitive empathy, militants have learnt to present their cause as aligned with Western humanitarian values, carefully curating their image as champions of freedom and justice. This dynamic is rooted in asymmetrical power relationships, where weaker groups often develop a detailed understanding of powerful parties, using cognitive empathy to identify and press the psychological buttons that influence those in power. These terrorists often possess a stronger cognitive grasp of Western psychology than Westerners understand jihadi psychology.
I think there is a lot of truth in this. However, many of those who project sympathy for the jihadis are not doing so because they have emotional empathy, but because they want to be believed to have emotional empathy. This is particularly the case, I think, in the case of media people and academics.
Also, empathy toward one group of people can serve as a self-justification for the unwholesome pleasures of cruelty–direct or vicarious–toward another group of people. See my post Conformity, Cruelty, and Political Activism. This phenomenon is particularly evident in the anti-Semitic behavior which is being justified by claims of empathy toward people in Gaza.
I remember something Chesterton said: ”
The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
There is today way too much latching onto pity toward a socially-acceptable set of designated victims and closing of minds toward the facts of the case (Chesterton’s “untruthfulness”)….and closing of hearts toward other groups of people who are being harmed by the policies purportedly intended to protect those designated victims.
The distinction among cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and pretended emotional empathy is an important one.
The envious man seeks not his own gain, But the fall of another, And in his malice, loses his soul, For the gods despise such hearts.
-Euripides
Quoted by @windduststars at this thread.
As Michael Gibson of 1517 Fund says, greed may not be good, but envy is evil.
Previous worth pondering post.
Gad Saad, a Canadian professor who seems a lot saner and more courageous than the general run of academics, has published an article in Newsweek: Kamala Harris is Hoping You Turn Your Brain Off and Vote on Emotion. He cites actor Ben Stiller on the reasons for his support for Harris: “All the energy and excitement that is around this movement right now.”
Emotional appeals are of course nothing new in politics: Plenty of people surely voted for John F Kennedy because he seemed more ‘youthful’ and ‘vigorous’ than did Nixon. And, as Professor Saad noted, emotional appears are also common in commercial marketing–“Sell the sizzle, not the steak” is an old saying in sales and marketing. And constructed iconic figures such as Betty Crocker have long been common. Still, it is also true that the marketing had better not depart too far from the truth about the product: if the steak is no good, the restaurant isn’t going to be getting a lot of return visits. If the cake mix results in an inedible cake, the customer is probably not going to buy that brand again.
Although emotional appeals are nothing new in politics, it seems clear that the Harris/Walz campaign is taking such appeals to new heights/depths. The characters projected for Harris and Walz has been constructed by some very smart people based on their assessment of what will sell. Does ‘opportunity’ poll well? Then have her talk about the ‘opportunity society.’ Is ‘freedom’ valued by most Americans? Then have her use that word a lot, regardless of how disconnected it may be from her actual policies. Indeed, the strategy appears to be to have her delay talking about policy as long as possible, similar to the way an overpriced restaurant may want to avoid having you see the actual menu until you’ve already made a reservation, parked (with valet parking) and have your entire party sitting down at the table.
There’s a pulp novel from 1954, Year of Consent, which projects a future United States which is nominally still a democracy–but the real power lies with the social engineers, sophisticated advertising & PR men who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want. When I reviewed this book in 2021, I saw some disturbing parallels with our present society. Today, and especially in the context of the Harris/Walz campaign, the parallels are even more disturbing. Review is here.
In the world posited by this novel: While the US still has a President, he is a figurehead and the administration of the country is actually done by the General Manager of the United States, who himself serves at the pleasure of the social engineers. Don’t we see a great deal of this today, with the increasing power of the administrative departments–and, especially, the figurehead nature of the current President, all highly dependent on the goodwill of the Communicating Classes? And isn’t the rage against X/Twitter and Elon Musk driven by the perception that this platform dares to defect from the unity of those Communicating Classes?
Are there enough people in the US today who are willing to seriously think about issues and policies, rather than just supporting and voting for what gives them a positive instantaneous feeling of some kind? By analogy, will they evaluate the car for reliability, performance, mileage, and crashworthiness, or will they just go with the model that shows the car with happy and attractive people?
And how can rational candidates do a better job of coupling solid policy stories with emotional appeals that are truly relevant as well as hard-hitting?