Hi friends,
Getting this one out late tonight! Here’s what I’d like to share:
What I’m Working On
The Great Kayfabrication: I’m hard at work on Part 2 of the How Politics Became Pro Wrestling series and aiming to release it in a couple weeks. It picks up where Part 1 left off: in the aftermath of World War II, during the postwar economic expansion. The video traces Eric Weinstein’s argument that the anomalous rate of growth the U.S. experienced from 1945-1971 led to the entrenchment of unsustainable “Embedded Growth Obligations” in our institutions. The “Great Kayfabrication” of the video’s title refers to the successive series of increasingly fake gimmicks we’ve used to prop up the illusion of growth in the wake of the 1971/73 stagnation. Hopefully all of this will make more sense in the actual video!
Stagnation Megathread: I’m trying to build the habit of releasing intermediate packets of work in the course of larger projects as a way of getting feedback and sustaining motivation. In that spirit, I wrote a Twitter thread on the Great Stagnation and related ideas as I did research for the video mentioned above. There are some great resources linked in the replies as well.
What I’m Reading (and Watching)
The Straussian Moment: This essay by Peter Thiel is apparently only available online in the most bizarre format imaginable: a scanned PNG file attached to a public Evernote note. Nevertheless, it’s worth the effort (reply to this email if you’d like me to send a PDF). Thiel gives full philosophical treatment here to his view, passed on from his Stanford mentor René Girard, that the problem of violence lies at the center of human nature and society. He argues that Enlightenment reasoning, on which our current liberal order is predicated, prevents us from thinking clearly about violence, obscuring our history of sacrificial bloodshed behind the myth of the social contract. The contemporary world, on Thiel’s view, is one in which we’ve sublimated the irreducibly adversarial nature of politics into fantasy, simulation, entertainment, and interiority — all the while imagining that we’ve banished the potential violence that lurks just beneath the surface. Tyler Cowen’s claim that Thiel has “the deepest understanding of the humanities [of anyone] that is out there now” is given ample support here.
The Decadent Society: Ross Douthat’s latest book covers many of the themes that are top of mind for me at the moment: stagnation, fantasy politics, and (in the new edition) the failure of our institutions in the face of COVID-19. But it also marries quasi-poetic cultural critique with rigorous argumentation in a way that I’ve found useful as a model for the tone I’d like to strike in my videos. Douthat echoes Thiel’s argument that post-1960s America has been characterized by a turn toward interiority at the expense of innovation:
“It is not a coincidence that the end of the space age has coincided with a turning inward in the developed world, a crisis of confidence and an ebb of optimism and a loss of faith in institutions, a shift toward therapeutic philosophies and technologies of simulation, an abandonment of both ideological ambition and religious hope.”
ALIENS: I’ve been enjoying speculating on the UFO videos that everyone’s been talking about of late, as well as reflecting on why it is that the idea of UFOs seems to meet such deep existential needs. This interview with D.W. Pasulka, based on her excellent book American Cosmic, gets into many of the fascinating connections between UFO mythology and religion. (If there’s interest, I may do a video about this.). More soberly, here are some solid debunkings (1, 2) of two of the recently released videos. And here is an excellent video essay on the 2004 ‘Tic Tac’ video, for which I haven’t yet seen a satisfactory debunking (which means it’s definitely aliens):
That’s all for this week! As always, if there’s anything you’d like me to be sharing in here or anything you’d like to discuss, feel free to reply to this email.
Cheers,
Jake
Frame Problems (05/26/21)
Hi Jake, I've read the Peter Thiel's essay and also watched your video on stagnation, but I'm still confused on how exactly lack of growth degenerate into violence. I understand the general argument "If the pie stop grwoing, the only way to get more is to steal part of the pie from someone else", but this is a very high-level argument, describing an abstract model of a social dynamic. I have these questions:
1. Can you share books/articles/essays that show empirical data from history that explains exactly how a stagnant society degenerates into violence? What are the stages that a society goes through that end up in violence?
2. If a society realizes that constant growth is impossible, couldn't the EGO(Embedded growth obligation) problem be solved by just maintaining the number of population constant over time? Planning birth rates in such a way that in the next generation there are not more people than in the previous one.