Alta -- What a fantastic read. I would love to hear more of your perspective on how it is people fall into this hyper-dogmatic mania, as if at gunpoint -- particularly since the pressure in the U.S. hasn't been applied by overt force but by >social< pressure. But I'm curious as to >when< you started to see American echoes of what you'd lived through.
Alta -- What a fantastic read. I would love to hear more of your perspective on how it is people fall into this hyper-dogmatic mania, as if at gunpoint -- particularly since the pressure in the U.S. hasn't been applied by overt force but by >social< pressure. But I'm curious as to >when< you started to see American echoes of what you'd lived through.
Social pressure has always been very strong in America. Soon after becoming a student I remember thinking, "God forbid of an authoritarian system here; most people are so conformist it would be worse than Communist Romania."
Yeah, it's almost like the collective alter-ego to the rugged-individualist streak that's >also< embedded in American culture. I don't have anything else to compare it to, but one thing I've noticed is that Americans, by and large, love iconoclasts and tend to celebrate them -- BUT it's >almost< as if those rule breakers exist just to prop-up everyone else into being dutiful rule followers. It's very strange. The people we celebrate in art and as celebrities are people whose non-conformist energy most Americans couldn't tolerate one-one hundredth of up close. It's a strange dissonance -- at least that's my take.
That is a great insight! You are right. But it may be that many cultures celebrate in literature the very people they couldn't otherwise tolerate. They idealize in fiction what they can't have in reality.
You wrote about intellectuals in both Romania and the U.S. That was really resonant for me as an American reader because it shows two phases of this repeating cycle -- and illustrates what direction in that cycle the West is headed in.
I think it's easy for those of us who didn't grow up in despotic regimes to just assume that despots hate intellectuals and artists because despots have this hunger to extinguish ideas that threaten their grip on power. I've sensed for a long time that's not entirely right, and now i can REALLY see it.
I think the ugly truth -- which you hint at -- is that despots actually have a point: elite intellectual classes do tend to kind of stew in their own myopia until they get completely detached from the society that supports their ideas with an oxygen supply. Eventually, the masses start to intuit the disconnect.
I work in a lane of media (music journalism) that is almost completely captured by the ruling intellectual orthodoxy of the moment. The mindlessness and rote repetition of prescribed language -- of reducing the world into a simplistic outlook that even a child would find inadequate -- is staggering.
It's like people have somehow come to hypnotize themselves into repeating not just irrational things but ANTI-rational edicts as inalienable truths. These sacramental ideas, when examined, all collapse under the irresolvable paradoxes in their own logic.
And yet people defend them with the kind of raging intensity that only people who've invested in lies can muster. They're too invested to turn back, so the only choice is to double-down.
What's so breathtaking about this is that it wasn't brute force that brought this on -- not initially, anyway. It was something far more insidious. It wasn't like we had an East German Stasi operating here and yet people gladly turned >themselves< into precisely that. And they did it gleefully.
As you point out, this came from the academy -- from the "chattering classes" who were somehow able to export their learned helplessness and terminal malaise to people who otherwise would never have been prone to those pathologies.
They did it by selling helplessness as empowerment. And by tempting so-called marginalized people with >deference< in everyday interactions -- people hopping on one knee in repentance for their "privilege" and making a concerted effort to "center marginalized voices" and all of that narcissistic twaddle.
But the price for that deference is 1) to allow oneself to be patronized and pitied and 2) to allow oneself to be infected by this mind virus that trains the mind to see grievance under every rock. So the ultimate price for deference is to send one's actual self-esteem on a downward spiral.
You're right that immigrants inherently do >not< see themselves as victims. I grew up in a lower-income neighborhood, and the language filtering down from indulgent, navel-gazing outlets like The New York Times is anathema to how the people I grew up around see themselves.
But this campaign of the upper class to project their own lack of agency onto those below them has actually worked, to a large degree. My point, though, is that right now in the States one can sense the anger that's built up against these people. And yet they have such extreme tunnel vision they simply can't fathom why.
So now I understand how it is that the bloodthirst and hatred towards these people comes to develop -- there's almost this innate sense that intellectuals naturally corrode the integrity of the social order. There's a point at which, with them at the helm getting high off the fumes of their own ideas, they'll shipwreck the whole program.
Dictators are people who step into the breach and exploit that anger and ride it into power, where they then have room to become monstrous and, in their own way, indulgent and non-sensical, gaslighting the public with similarly bald-faced lies that fly in the face of what is plainly visible to the naked eye.
All of this makes me wonder what's next for us, and whether there's any way out of this cycle. Would love to get your thoughts!
Once again, I agree with everything. Brilliantly put. On the one hand, there is something insular about intellectuals in general--they feel called to save the little people and start developing all kinds of fictions that they end up believing in; on the other, there is something particularly worrisome about American intellectuals in particular who have created a dictatorship of their own making with no help from any dictator (I am not entirely sure, but I think this may be a first in world history). And, indeed, there is an anger now in America coming from the working classes, which will be expressed in the forthcoming vote. And we know exactly who will capitalize on this, we know his name, and after he wins the elections, things are going to get even more insane. And the intellectual elite will have had a major role in the ensuing catastrophe. But you are right, at this point they can no longer go back, they have to defend the insane ideas they have been defending. The sad thing, when I interact with people like you, is that there are, clearly, in this country, lucid, intelligent people with common sense, yet somehow all the key positions in the media and the cultural institutions have been taken by the opportunists and the idiots.
First, having more and more conversations with people such as yourself, and knowing that people are building channels for us to find ideas like yours -- that, to me, speaks volumes.
Moreover, I feel hopeful that we can train younger people in a whole new paradigm of journalism and media/idea-consumption.
I wouldn't call it "critical-thinking" skills but "integrative" or "synthesis" thinking -- showing young people how to engage with >multiple< perspectives, how to see issues as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, and even to hold contradictory views at once.
Basically, the world is direly in need of archetypal Geminian energy, LOL, a concept that has salience regardless of one's literal view on astrology because it applies on a metaphorical level.
The phrase "talking out of both sides of your mouth" has negative connotations, but it should be re-framed as a virtue. All it takes is reaching the next generation with a handful of ideas and watching them become memetic.
I'm hopeful because I have two close friends in my town who are very active in media and both interested in co-counding a co-op media outlet that's kind of micro-local but global in focus. One of these friends has always been quite far on the woke end, but even >he< agrees with me that all speech should be platformed.
That tells me something -- that the ingredients are there. Yes, the U.S. has descended into madness, but I see more sensible conversations in comment sections than I'd ever dreamed were possible 20 years ago.
Another positive indicator: people now challenge the thinkers they follow. They have robust debates among fellow fans of the Substackers and YouTubers they like. This, to me, looks extremely healthy. You can see a kind of anti-choir effect happening. People are not only craving depth and variance of perspective but they're becoming individual vectors for it.
So I'm more excited than discouraged. Of course, it takes a certain measure of self-importance to think one can spit into a hurricane and make a difference, but I'm a-okay with that because, at the end of the day, I do not think it's the destiny of the human species to live as hive-minded insects.
It has always been difficult for us as a collective organism to balance between being reliant on group approval and self-actualization. That's never been easy, so why should it be easy now? If something's always been hard, then it's like "Okay, well let's roll our sleeves up and get to it, then."
I personally feel that humanity is slowly waking up to an awareness of our inter-dependence. I think a lot of what we're seeing now is kind of spasms of resistance to that awareness.
That resistance takes form in horrifying catastrophic ways, but once more and more people tune-in to the idea that we >can< function together as a kind of single brain, that will ironically leave room for more individual perspective. There will be >less< need to confirm.
This may sound airy-fairy, but I look at it more like physics -- or as a form of macro-neurology. I'm not a scientist, but those frameworks help. As does the noosphere concept.
And we can look at this at a kind of pre-school/toddler level, which is: there is no "other." Anyone who behaves horribly has the same needs as you so in essence >is< you and vice-versa.
Sounds new-agey, but I don't think so. I'm convinced by what I'm seeing that human beings are >more< empathetic than ever -- we're just not having an easy time coping with our increased awareness.
So we're having a kind of collective bipolar episode, which is indeed dangerous and ugly and threatens the entire planet but can >also< be offset by how these tribulations are helping us evolve.
Once again, you are right. There has been a positive effect to this whole madness, and I myself did notice that, at least here on Substack, some kind of intellectual revival is taking place. There are very interesting discussions taking place, true debates that didn't exist before. It is as if we now live in a universe with two parallel spaces--the one of the official media populated by groupthink, and an alternative world where real intellectual debates are going on. And I am gladdened to see that even (some) young people--who have been the first victims of wokism--are part of it.
Also, tomorrow's teenagers are GOING to rebel against this -- just as artist/comedians did in the '60s and '90s. Today's young adults seek safety, but the next generation will smash their pieties (and ours). As they should!
I've just posted this as kind of a simple prescription for combating divisiveness:
This is key point, but i will point out, that conformity is breaking. It started with the enforcement of vaccine and masks. Many many people are saying never again.
Have you had the chance to experience midwest America? It's a big country, but you might find there's a parallel reality bubbling up. A resurgence of classical education and traditional values. And of course living in flyover country many of these things affect us minimally to begin with.
If I wanted to read a book from a Romanian author what would you recommend?
Thank you for reading. Well, I happen to be a Romanian author :). I also write fiction, and my first novel, "The Wife Who Wasn't", is about a family of Moldovans who immigrate to Santa Barbara, California, and the numerous cultural misunderstandings that ensue. See description here. http://www.altaifland.com/wife.html (You can buy it on Amazon)
Alta -- What a fantastic read. I would love to hear more of your perspective on how it is people fall into this hyper-dogmatic mania, as if at gunpoint -- particularly since the pressure in the U.S. hasn't been applied by overt force but by >social< pressure. But I'm curious as to >when< you started to see American echoes of what you'd lived through.
Social pressure has always been very strong in America. Soon after becoming a student I remember thinking, "God forbid of an authoritarian system here; most people are so conformist it would be worse than Communist Romania."
Yeah, it's almost like the collective alter-ego to the rugged-individualist streak that's >also< embedded in American culture. I don't have anything else to compare it to, but one thing I've noticed is that Americans, by and large, love iconoclasts and tend to celebrate them -- BUT it's >almost< as if those rule breakers exist just to prop-up everyone else into being dutiful rule followers. It's very strange. The people we celebrate in art and as celebrities are people whose non-conformist energy most Americans couldn't tolerate one-one hundredth of up close. It's a strange dissonance -- at least that's my take.
That is a great insight! You are right. But it may be that many cultures celebrate in literature the very people they couldn't otherwise tolerate. They idealize in fiction what they can't have in reality.
You wrote about intellectuals in both Romania and the U.S. That was really resonant for me as an American reader because it shows two phases of this repeating cycle -- and illustrates what direction in that cycle the West is headed in.
I think it's easy for those of us who didn't grow up in despotic regimes to just assume that despots hate intellectuals and artists because despots have this hunger to extinguish ideas that threaten their grip on power. I've sensed for a long time that's not entirely right, and now i can REALLY see it.
I think the ugly truth -- which you hint at -- is that despots actually have a point: elite intellectual classes do tend to kind of stew in their own myopia until they get completely detached from the society that supports their ideas with an oxygen supply. Eventually, the masses start to intuit the disconnect.
I work in a lane of media (music journalism) that is almost completely captured by the ruling intellectual orthodoxy of the moment. The mindlessness and rote repetition of prescribed language -- of reducing the world into a simplistic outlook that even a child would find inadequate -- is staggering.
It's like people have somehow come to hypnotize themselves into repeating not just irrational things but ANTI-rational edicts as inalienable truths. These sacramental ideas, when examined, all collapse under the irresolvable paradoxes in their own logic.
And yet people defend them with the kind of raging intensity that only people who've invested in lies can muster. They're too invested to turn back, so the only choice is to double-down.
What's so breathtaking about this is that it wasn't brute force that brought this on -- not initially, anyway. It was something far more insidious. It wasn't like we had an East German Stasi operating here and yet people gladly turned >themselves< into precisely that. And they did it gleefully.
As you point out, this came from the academy -- from the "chattering classes" who were somehow able to export their learned helplessness and terminal malaise to people who otherwise would never have been prone to those pathologies.
They did it by selling helplessness as empowerment. And by tempting so-called marginalized people with >deference< in everyday interactions -- people hopping on one knee in repentance for their "privilege" and making a concerted effort to "center marginalized voices" and all of that narcissistic twaddle.
But the price for that deference is 1) to allow oneself to be patronized and pitied and 2) to allow oneself to be infected by this mind virus that trains the mind to see grievance under every rock. So the ultimate price for deference is to send one's actual self-esteem on a downward spiral.
You're right that immigrants inherently do >not< see themselves as victims. I grew up in a lower-income neighborhood, and the language filtering down from indulgent, navel-gazing outlets like The New York Times is anathema to how the people I grew up around see themselves.
But this campaign of the upper class to project their own lack of agency onto those below them has actually worked, to a large degree. My point, though, is that right now in the States one can sense the anger that's built up against these people. And yet they have such extreme tunnel vision they simply can't fathom why.
So now I understand how it is that the bloodthirst and hatred towards these people comes to develop -- there's almost this innate sense that intellectuals naturally corrode the integrity of the social order. There's a point at which, with them at the helm getting high off the fumes of their own ideas, they'll shipwreck the whole program.
Dictators are people who step into the breach and exploit that anger and ride it into power, where they then have room to become monstrous and, in their own way, indulgent and non-sensical, gaslighting the public with similarly bald-faced lies that fly in the face of what is plainly visible to the naked eye.
All of this makes me wonder what's next for us, and whether there's any way out of this cycle. Would love to get your thoughts!
Once again, I agree with everything. Brilliantly put. On the one hand, there is something insular about intellectuals in general--they feel called to save the little people and start developing all kinds of fictions that they end up believing in; on the other, there is something particularly worrisome about American intellectuals in particular who have created a dictatorship of their own making with no help from any dictator (I am not entirely sure, but I think this may be a first in world history). And, indeed, there is an anger now in America coming from the working classes, which will be expressed in the forthcoming vote. And we know exactly who will capitalize on this, we know his name, and after he wins the elections, things are going to get even more insane. And the intellectual elite will have had a major role in the ensuing catastrophe. But you are right, at this point they can no longer go back, they have to defend the insane ideas they have been defending. The sad thing, when I interact with people like you, is that there are, clearly, in this country, lucid, intelligent people with common sense, yet somehow all the key positions in the media and the cultural institutions have been taken by the opportunists and the idiots.
I actually don't feel sad!
First, having more and more conversations with people such as yourself, and knowing that people are building channels for us to find ideas like yours -- that, to me, speaks volumes.
Moreover, I feel hopeful that we can train younger people in a whole new paradigm of journalism and media/idea-consumption.
I wouldn't call it "critical-thinking" skills but "integrative" or "synthesis" thinking -- showing young people how to engage with >multiple< perspectives, how to see issues as multi-layered and multi-dimensional, and even to hold contradictory views at once.
Basically, the world is direly in need of archetypal Geminian energy, LOL, a concept that has salience regardless of one's literal view on astrology because it applies on a metaphorical level.
The phrase "talking out of both sides of your mouth" has negative connotations, but it should be re-framed as a virtue. All it takes is reaching the next generation with a handful of ideas and watching them become memetic.
I'm hopeful because I have two close friends in my town who are very active in media and both interested in co-counding a co-op media outlet that's kind of micro-local but global in focus. One of these friends has always been quite far on the woke end, but even >he< agrees with me that all speech should be platformed.
That tells me something -- that the ingredients are there. Yes, the U.S. has descended into madness, but I see more sensible conversations in comment sections than I'd ever dreamed were possible 20 years ago.
Another positive indicator: people now challenge the thinkers they follow. They have robust debates among fellow fans of the Substackers and YouTubers they like. This, to me, looks extremely healthy. You can see a kind of anti-choir effect happening. People are not only craving depth and variance of perspective but they're becoming individual vectors for it.
So I'm more excited than discouraged. Of course, it takes a certain measure of self-importance to think one can spit into a hurricane and make a difference, but I'm a-okay with that because, at the end of the day, I do not think it's the destiny of the human species to live as hive-minded insects.
It has always been difficult for us as a collective organism to balance between being reliant on group approval and self-actualization. That's never been easy, so why should it be easy now? If something's always been hard, then it's like "Okay, well let's roll our sleeves up and get to it, then."
I personally feel that humanity is slowly waking up to an awareness of our inter-dependence. I think a lot of what we're seeing now is kind of spasms of resistance to that awareness.
That resistance takes form in horrifying catastrophic ways, but once more and more people tune-in to the idea that we >can< function together as a kind of single brain, that will ironically leave room for more individual perspective. There will be >less< need to confirm.
This may sound airy-fairy, but I look at it more like physics -- or as a form of macro-neurology. I'm not a scientist, but those frameworks help. As does the noosphere concept.
And we can look at this at a kind of pre-school/toddler level, which is: there is no "other." Anyone who behaves horribly has the same needs as you so in essence >is< you and vice-versa.
Sounds new-agey, but I don't think so. I'm convinced by what I'm seeing that human beings are >more< empathetic than ever -- we're just not having an easy time coping with our increased awareness.
So we're having a kind of collective bipolar episode, which is indeed dangerous and ugly and threatens the entire planet but can >also< be offset by how these tribulations are helping us evolve.
This was supposed to be a brief answer!
Once again, you are right. There has been a positive effect to this whole madness, and I myself did notice that, at least here on Substack, some kind of intellectual revival is taking place. There are very interesting discussions taking place, true debates that didn't exist before. It is as if we now live in a universe with two parallel spaces--the one of the official media populated by groupthink, and an alternative world where real intellectual debates are going on. And I am gladdened to see that even (some) young people--who have been the first victims of wokism--are part of it.
Also, tomorrow's teenagers are GOING to rebel against this -- just as artist/comedians did in the '60s and '90s. Today's young adults seek safety, but the next generation will smash their pieties (and ours). As they should!
I've just posted this as kind of a simple prescription for combating divisiveness:
https://open.substack.com/pub/feedbackdef/p/a-new-way-to-look-at-left-vs-right
Great point, that's my hope as well!
This is key point, but i will point out, that conformity is breaking. It started with the enforcement of vaccine and masks. Many many people are saying never again.
Have you had the chance to experience midwest America? It's a big country, but you might find there's a parallel reality bubbling up. A resurgence of classical education and traditional values. And of course living in flyover country many of these things affect us minimally to begin with.
If I wanted to read a book from a Romanian author what would you recommend?
Thank you for reading. Well, I happen to be a Romanian author :). I also write fiction, and my first novel, "The Wife Who Wasn't", is about a family of Moldovans who immigrate to Santa Barbara, California, and the numerous cultural misunderstandings that ensue. See description here. http://www.altaifland.com/wife.html (You can buy it on Amazon)