Perhaps my thoughts are not clear on this matter so my expression was also unclear.
I reject the managerial regime, even while having to live within its territories.
In the context of a 'temporalist' (coherent communal) regime, the crux of behavioral issues (like 'trans' or 'village idiot' or 'village drunk') is that of 'eccentricity' versus 'deviance'.
You mentioned 'dignity' and that seems to a factor that needs to be considered. I believe that the coherent community can accord 'dignity' to the eccentric, but not the genuinely deviant. The difference being that eccentrics don't challenge any foundational principles and deviants do.
If you ever get a chance, track down the episodes of the American TV show 'The Andy Griffith Show' and look for the episodes with 'Otis' the town drunk. I'd call their approach 'permissive correction' in the sense that no one thinks they can force Otis to stop being a drunk, so they reduce the harm he does by giving him the keys to the jail to 'sleep it off' while always looking for ways to give him something better than booze to organize his life.
As a deviant, Foucault's 'histories' are always about how 'the system' suppresses deviance and 'harms' them. He has no interest in why such suppression might be beneficial to everyone else.
As for Laing, he suffered, I think, from the illusion that every mentally ill person was as clever and sensitive as himself. Laing had a theory about 'schizophrenia' and I'd say that theory might have been disproven. I don't think Laing was trying to immiserate his fellow sufferers. He was just wrong.
Other than physics, my experience has led me to accept that there is no meaning outside community. What it means for something to 'mean' is simply to 'be a meaning for' some community. What Darwin exposes to possible consideration is whether or not a particular community - with all its combined values and the decisions to act or not act that arise from those values - is sustainable independent of 'thoughts in our head'.
In the case of the German Home Towns, the towns were not sustainable due to their inability to defend themselves in the context of an emergent spatialist regime. The spatialists have been destroying coherent communal cultures since 300AD. They've gotten good at it. Those of us who see the struggle as 'coherent community' versus 'managerial regime' need to figure out how we can protect the communities we so desperately need to build.
Aside of my inclination to observe that it long predates 300AD (as I responded to another comment on this post, Cleisthene's 508BC reforms went a long way in gutting temporalist Athens), I don't see much in there to disagree with. In fact, my argument in the book of course is that under the harsh Darwinian conditions of temporalist society, spatials in general and especially "spiteful mutants" have a difficult time surviving. I suspect that's partly because -- as Ed Dutton or Michael Woodley hypothesize -- they're a large portion of the high infant mortality rate characterizing such societies. But as you say, if such phenotypes do survive childhood they're no doubt often subject to ostracism or worse. It's only when societies become more prosperous do spatials start to be more tolerated, and maybe even welcomed, as their high openness contributes to advances in the arts, sciences, and technology. By then, though, the society or civilization if one prefers has begun its march to spatialism.
TLDR: The 'spiteful mutants' are a symptom of an imbalance. But I don't think the imbalance is due to 'prosperity'. It's simply due to a lack of a 'countering agent' to the 'spiteful mutants' that would keep them in check. It's to the health and well-being of this 'countering agent' that we should be looking.
Based upon my own ongoing research and your excellent essays on Mack's German Home Towns, it's clear that the viability of local communities *against* totalizing spacialist intrusions is the way to go. In America, this is going to look like alternative currencies and nullification of federal authority.
I've been thinking about your response because there was something about it that I wasn't comfortable with but couldn't quite pin down. But I think I've figured it out: The positioning of 'prosperity' as a negative. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems like 'prosperity = decadence' is an article of faith on the Right, and as such, not given much thought as to whether it is *necessarily* the actual case.
Also, as to the 'Darwinian conditions' on human genetic distribution including that of 'spiteful mutants', all that anyone can say for sure about 'Darwinian conditions' is that they select for two things: The ability to extract required nutrients from the environment and reproductive fecundity. It's obvious that 'spiteful mutant' genetic material was not removed over the long sweep of human evolution. Consequently, it seems reasonable to assume that 'evolution' isn't particularly concerned with spiteful mutants.
So, let us for a moment treat the entire European population as a single collective entity. It would seem that, whether we like them or not, 'spiteful mutants' have some positive contribution to make to survival of that population ('openness'). As a part of a single organism, the problem isn't simply the existence or even prevalence of spiteful mutancy, it's the lack of a dynamic equilibrium between 'spiteful mutants' and some other part of the population that plays the role of counter to the adverse aspects of these 'spiteful mutants'.
In nature, whenever there is a sudden population growth of some particular part of the ecosystem, the cause is usually due to a sudden loss of a 'predator' of some kind. Aldo Leopold talks about this. To correct the problem, you have to look away from the obvious expression of the issue and look 'upstream' for the likely causal agent. I think these causal agents are the various methods that spacialists have used to undermine temporalist (local) social, political and economic relations.
I don't think we get rid of 'spiteful mutants'. What we can do is get rid of the spatialist influences that grant such 'mutants' social power in excess of their value to the collective.
Hamburger, thanks for another thorough and thoughtful contribution to the comments. You put me in a bit of a bind, though. Obviously, it would be unreasonable for me to expect anyone commenting to have read my book. Yet, one of the reasons I wrote the book, was so I wouldn't have to continually repeat myself on the relevant points.
So, I'll split the difference by offering some very brief replies, leaving it up to anyone reading this to read the book if they want the full story.
I don't agree with your characterization of spiteful mutants, though yours is the more common one, certainly. In my opinion, any phenotype has evolved because, at least under certain conditions, its fitness thrives. Spiteful mutants are not different from any other phenotype in that regard.
I certainly don't regard prosperity as negative. I refrain from any moral judgment of it. It is an important dynamic in the phenotype wars, but like all such dynamics, it has its tradeoffs, some of which are good for some phenotypes, and some of which are good for other phenotypes. I understand you have a commitment to a certain values position. I do not; I aspire to as impartial a scholarship as I am capable. Though, I do appreciate that some kind of resuscitation of temporalism is likely a means to soften the coming arc in the spiral of the phenotype wars, which has the potential to be quite unpleasant. But I'm not a temporal by disposition.
I'd also push back on your characterization of evolution. The only thing that matters for evolution is fitness: i.e., successfully manifesting one's genes in future generations, which does not require sexual reproduction: e.g., inclusive fitness. That's why spiteful mutants can be phenotypically successful under certain conditions.
In broad strokes, I do agree with the gist of your final couple paragraphs, though as you'd imagine by now, I come to such conclusions by a different route. As long our society remains highly space biased, it will be a breeding ground for the SMs. They're not going away until the conditions favoring their phenotypic strategy are gone -- including though hardly restricted to high prosperity. But of course explaining my reasons for such a claim would entail distilling here the arguments of a nearly 500 page book.
But as always your comments were engaging. Thank you.
I agree that the proper response would be to affirm the autonomy (and dignity) of 'the family' while also creating a discplinary regime for 'professionals'.
But I would be remiss if I didn't point out the absence of the use of the phrase 'mental illness' in the discourse around 'trans' and LGBTQ'.
'Adult transitioners' are simply crazy people. If they thought they were Napolean, it would be more obvious what's wrong with them. But *academics* made this particular kind of insanity respectable.
Because of liberal (spatial) ideology, people think 'rights' inhere in persons and that assumption *requires* the bearer of such rights to be 'autonomous' and 'responsible for their actions'.
But that's simply a false presentation of reality.
The Left is correct when it proposed 'the personal is the political and the political is the personal'. At least it was correct in recognizing that there's no barrier to the effects *on others* that emanate from our actions.
The only option is to create communities of like-minded and like-acting persons and exclude those who are not inclined to conform to the values of 'the community'.
If all the people involved in 'adult transitions' had to live in their own communities *only* with people who are also 'adult transitioners' and their enablers, we could see whether or not their specific 'community values' would be capable of forming a sustainable community.
In brief, all liberalism follows the capitalist dictum of 'internalize the profits, externalize the costs' and such is the case with these spacialist 'communities' of deviance.
The latter part of your comment is clearly an argument for a temporalist regime, such as I've explored here at length -- and will continue to do so in the immediate future. (Watch for the next series!) I think you do a fine job of identifying the values and norms that underpin such an outlook. Of course there's an interesting wrinkle with matters of mental illness in gemeinschaft contexts. The "village idiot" (whom I'm guessing could have been engaging in crossdressing behaviour in some situations) was often treated with dignity if not actual seriousness. In any case, they tended not to be pathologized, precisely due to the absence of a managerial class therapeutic infrastructure to provide such stigmatization.
But of course when we start invoking mental illness under the auspices of a spatialist regime, we run into the Foucault problem. Even if we can agree upon some kind of objective metric for measuring mental illness -- e.g., capacity for self care, evolutionary fitness -- interpretation of such a metric is always open to dispute. In the seemingly obvious case of capacity for self care, perhaps you're familiar with the anti-psychiatry movement associated to R.D. Lange, in which patients were allowed to wallow in their own filth (as I recall) under the conviction that this was a passage they had to complete to return to functional health: evidence that even an understanding of that seemingly obvious variable or metric can hardly be assumed to be universally taken as self evident.
And then of course, given the propensity to concept creep exhibited by the verbally dexterous managerial class, which we've all seen so much of in recent decades (e.g., racism, violence, hate), the risk of politicizing and weaponizing mental health diagnoses against the regime's self-identified enemies presents serious danger. The Soviet Union of course was infamous for this kind of thing, but we can hardly say it has been unheard of elsewhere.
So, while I understand your perspective on the mental illness side of the issue, personally I'm reluctant to empower managerial class bureaucratic paternalism with resort to those kinds of characterizations. Thanks so much for your contribution to the comments.
I agree and disagree with your summation. It’s been very one sided with the pro lgbtq+ movement basically being pushed hard onto everyone like it or not. I know parents are very upset with not being informed or even included in their own child’s life with major monumental decisions like changing genders taking place. My kids are grown but you can be sure I would have been very unhappy if my kids were young now so I think Danielle Smith’s approach is a very reasonable starting approach to finally offer some clear guidelines although nowhere near ready for legislation until the fall and nothing is perfect.
I don’t believe children are old enough or mature enough to make this life altering decision that will be with them for the rest of their lives and I know no one loves your kids quite like you do or as much as you do, the parents I mean, well intentioned tho they may be. You’ve got to ask yourself what percentage are genuine trans kids and what percentage are indoctrinated, I believe far more are indoctrinated so this push towards children changing genders has permanent and lifelong lasting consequences for them.
Sonya. You understood there was nothing in what I wrote endorsing the idea that the kids should be deciding?
I have no opinion on whether Smith's approach is reasonable or not. I'm just saying its not rightwing, in the sense that it doesn't promote temporalist values. In that it was a lost opportunity.
But I certainly agree that I'm happy that my kids aren't having to grow up amidst all this spiteful mutant nonsense. Though I do have a granddaughter to worry about now.
I guess what bothers me the most is how one sided this entire subject has felt and if you dare to disagree with it being pushed onto minors then you are labeled as anti trans. I have a trans son so no I’m most definitely not anti trans but when I said to him I did not agree with the way it was being pushed onto children he said he likewise didn’t understand the push towards children.
The best I have heard it explained is the Liberal party prior to Trudeau was just left of center but the Trudeau Liberals have now moved so far over to the left that what used to be considered the center has become considered now to be on the right or “far right” as you always hear.
I clearly have no expertise in politics nor history but I’m learning from recently having discovered Northern Perspective on YouTube regarding our Canadian politics and how they work.
I value your writing because you make me think about and look at things with an altogether different and much more complex perspective which is always a good thing!
So, do you actually think that parents should be given absolute authority over their children? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that's what your post sounded like to me. No amount of abuse would justify interference by the State, as far as you're concerned?
Irena. First, this substack is not a venue for me to promote my own mores and values. I keep those to myself. Second, abuse is a common denominator of human life. An abuse-free world is not an option, nor does such an imagined arcadia have anything to do with the tradeoffs that are at stake in the current historical situation. Thanks for your contribution to the comments.
Abuse does indeed occur in all human societies, as does murder for example. An abuse-free world is not possible, and neither is a murder-free world, but some societies have a lot more abuse/murder than others. The real question is: what do you do about it? An extreme right-wing position might indeed be that, as long as the perpetrators are the victim's parents, nothing at all should be done about it, just as an extreme left-wing position would be that parents shouldn't interfere with the raising of their own children. That's why extremes usually lead to hell.
Irena. Usually when people use this adjective "extreme" I'm not quite sure what is intended beyond some kind of emotional hyper-charging of the claim. Maybe we could tone down the emotional side of this by defaulting to the more generic terms I've developed: spatials and temporals (since left and right don't really make much sense prior to the French Revolution). I certainly agree under the hegemonic regime of either phenotype life is very bad for the other phenotype -- though obviously quite good for the one enjoying the hegemony. (So hell, as you put it, is a matter of perspective.) I'm even inclined to agree with Innis that there may be some kind of golden age along the arc from one phenotype's hegemony to the other's, when there's something of a balance in society between their dispositions. But as it came, that too must pass. Again, I'm just describing reality, not any preference on my part.
However, it might be worth mentioning a few further points. First of all there is no one on the the planet who is a more trustworthy and reliable custodian of a child than that child's biological parents. You might want to investigate the work of Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, who studied the data generated by child protection agencies across different jurisdictions. They found that in the case of family abuse of children the perpetrator in only a very tiny fraction of cases was a biological parent. Usually it was foster, adoptive, step, live-in common law "parents," or extended relatives. And as Wilson and Daly observe, if you have even the most passing understanding of evolutionary biology, this would be a very easy outcome to have predicted.
So if your sole or top priority is making a consequentialist case for protecting children, there's nothing better for them you can do than taking actions to assure they are with their biological parents; statistically its the best bet for their well-being. Again, that doesn't mean there are no biological parents who are evolutionary mistakes in terms of fitness. For the consequentialist argument, though, that very tiny number of harms then has to be weighed against the immense harms done to children by the state. Or more precisely the spatialist regime. Do I really need to list these for you?
And perhaps to clarify, it's useful to consider the matter of murder. Even under the contemporary spatialist regime, there's no standardized approach to dealing with murder. Canada has federal law against it applicable everywhere in the country. The United States does not. Instead, each state has its own law. At least in theory, a U.S. state could not have a law against murder if it chose. Likewise, if you look at temporalist regimes, there is considerable variety. In the Roman Republic, family's had absolute power of life and death over their own members. In many jurisdictions of Medieval Europe, even within families, murder was addressed through community procedures, grounded in customary law. Resolution of murder between families was an even more diverse situation, but that's getting us too far off course.
There's no single correct answer to the tragedies of human life. And at different arcs of the phenotype wars, different societies will find different solutions. And as times change, and we move across the next arc, such solutions likely will eventually be abandoned for others. And all this movement and choice is caught up in preferences and personality structures of the phenotypes that are gaining or losing power in the process. That's what I'm investigating here.
To clarify what I said last night. This substack is not about proselytizing; it aims at scholarship. To draw upon the famous Humean distinction between is and ought. My project here is to identify what is (or has been) extant and what thereby is possible. I leave what "ought to be" to the hot-take geniuses all over YouTube. Any particular social arrangement you find distasteful is entirely your business. I have no delusion that there is a tragic dimension to human life; nor am I deluded that either phenotype has a monopoly on that tragedy.
I hope that helps clarify my position and approach. Whether this is the right substack for you, of course, you'll have to decide from there. Again, thank you for your comment, and the opportunity to clarify some of these points.
In the particular context that I was using it in, "extreme" (maybe I should have written "fundamentalist") means "take an abstract principle and take it all the way to its logical conclusion." I cannot think of any example in which this does not lead to outcomes that a large majority of humans would find highly unpalatable.
In any case, "temporalist regimes" have one big disadvantage over "spatial" ones, in the sense that if your spatial neighbor can raise a large, highly disciplined army while you are incapable of doing the same, then you will be defeated, possibly killed or enslaved, and your space will end up being ruled by a foreign spatial regime. So, eventually, all human societies become "spatial," with the possible exception of those that live in highly inaccessible/undesirable areas (such as barren mountain tops). Is this reversible? Sure it is: all it takes are much lower population densities than our planet currently has. Much, much lower.
Perhaps my thoughts are not clear on this matter so my expression was also unclear.
I reject the managerial regime, even while having to live within its territories.
In the context of a 'temporalist' (coherent communal) regime, the crux of behavioral issues (like 'trans' or 'village idiot' or 'village drunk') is that of 'eccentricity' versus 'deviance'.
You mentioned 'dignity' and that seems to a factor that needs to be considered. I believe that the coherent community can accord 'dignity' to the eccentric, but not the genuinely deviant. The difference being that eccentrics don't challenge any foundational principles and deviants do.
If you ever get a chance, track down the episodes of the American TV show 'The Andy Griffith Show' and look for the episodes with 'Otis' the town drunk. I'd call their approach 'permissive correction' in the sense that no one thinks they can force Otis to stop being a drunk, so they reduce the harm he does by giving him the keys to the jail to 'sleep it off' while always looking for ways to give him something better than booze to organize his life.
As a deviant, Foucault's 'histories' are always about how 'the system' suppresses deviance and 'harms' them. He has no interest in why such suppression might be beneficial to everyone else.
As for Laing, he suffered, I think, from the illusion that every mentally ill person was as clever and sensitive as himself. Laing had a theory about 'schizophrenia' and I'd say that theory might have been disproven. I don't think Laing was trying to immiserate his fellow sufferers. He was just wrong.
Other than physics, my experience has led me to accept that there is no meaning outside community. What it means for something to 'mean' is simply to 'be a meaning for' some community. What Darwin exposes to possible consideration is whether or not a particular community - with all its combined values and the decisions to act or not act that arise from those values - is sustainable independent of 'thoughts in our head'.
In the case of the German Home Towns, the towns were not sustainable due to their inability to defend themselves in the context of an emergent spatialist regime. The spatialists have been destroying coherent communal cultures since 300AD. They've gotten good at it. Those of us who see the struggle as 'coherent community' versus 'managerial regime' need to figure out how we can protect the communities we so desperately need to build.
Aside of my inclination to observe that it long predates 300AD (as I responded to another comment on this post, Cleisthene's 508BC reforms went a long way in gutting temporalist Athens), I don't see much in there to disagree with. In fact, my argument in the book of course is that under the harsh Darwinian conditions of temporalist society, spatials in general and especially "spiteful mutants" have a difficult time surviving. I suspect that's partly because -- as Ed Dutton or Michael Woodley hypothesize -- they're a large portion of the high infant mortality rate characterizing such societies. But as you say, if such phenotypes do survive childhood they're no doubt often subject to ostracism or worse. It's only when societies become more prosperous do spatials start to be more tolerated, and maybe even welcomed, as their high openness contributes to advances in the arts, sciences, and technology. By then, though, the society or civilization if one prefers has begun its march to spatialism.
Thanks.
TLDR: The 'spiteful mutants' are a symptom of an imbalance. But I don't think the imbalance is due to 'prosperity'. It's simply due to a lack of a 'countering agent' to the 'spiteful mutants' that would keep them in check. It's to the health and well-being of this 'countering agent' that we should be looking.
Based upon my own ongoing research and your excellent essays on Mack's German Home Towns, it's clear that the viability of local communities *against* totalizing spacialist intrusions is the way to go. In America, this is going to look like alternative currencies and nullification of federal authority.
I've been thinking about your response because there was something about it that I wasn't comfortable with but couldn't quite pin down. But I think I've figured it out: The positioning of 'prosperity' as a negative. I'm not saying you're wrong, but it seems like 'prosperity = decadence' is an article of faith on the Right, and as such, not given much thought as to whether it is *necessarily* the actual case.
Also, as to the 'Darwinian conditions' on human genetic distribution including that of 'spiteful mutants', all that anyone can say for sure about 'Darwinian conditions' is that they select for two things: The ability to extract required nutrients from the environment and reproductive fecundity. It's obvious that 'spiteful mutant' genetic material was not removed over the long sweep of human evolution. Consequently, it seems reasonable to assume that 'evolution' isn't particularly concerned with spiteful mutants.
However, humans have been concerned with certain kinds of deviance like 'crime'. And the authorities response to crime may have had an impact on European genetics: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/147470491501300114
So, let us for a moment treat the entire European population as a single collective entity. It would seem that, whether we like them or not, 'spiteful mutants' have some positive contribution to make to survival of that population ('openness'). As a part of a single organism, the problem isn't simply the existence or even prevalence of spiteful mutancy, it's the lack of a dynamic equilibrium between 'spiteful mutants' and some other part of the population that plays the role of counter to the adverse aspects of these 'spiteful mutants'.
In nature, whenever there is a sudden population growth of some particular part of the ecosystem, the cause is usually due to a sudden loss of a 'predator' of some kind. Aldo Leopold talks about this. To correct the problem, you have to look away from the obvious expression of the issue and look 'upstream' for the likely causal agent. I think these causal agents are the various methods that spacialists have used to undermine temporalist (local) social, political and economic relations.
I don't think we get rid of 'spiteful mutants'. What we can do is get rid of the spatialist influences that grant such 'mutants' social power in excess of their value to the collective.
Hamburger, thanks for another thorough and thoughtful contribution to the comments. You put me in a bit of a bind, though. Obviously, it would be unreasonable for me to expect anyone commenting to have read my book. Yet, one of the reasons I wrote the book, was so I wouldn't have to continually repeat myself on the relevant points.
So, I'll split the difference by offering some very brief replies, leaving it up to anyone reading this to read the book if they want the full story.
I don't agree with your characterization of spiteful mutants, though yours is the more common one, certainly. In my opinion, any phenotype has evolved because, at least under certain conditions, its fitness thrives. Spiteful mutants are not different from any other phenotype in that regard.
I certainly don't regard prosperity as negative. I refrain from any moral judgment of it. It is an important dynamic in the phenotype wars, but like all such dynamics, it has its tradeoffs, some of which are good for some phenotypes, and some of which are good for other phenotypes. I understand you have a commitment to a certain values position. I do not; I aspire to as impartial a scholarship as I am capable. Though, I do appreciate that some kind of resuscitation of temporalism is likely a means to soften the coming arc in the spiral of the phenotype wars, which has the potential to be quite unpleasant. But I'm not a temporal by disposition.
I'd also push back on your characterization of evolution. The only thing that matters for evolution is fitness: i.e., successfully manifesting one's genes in future generations, which does not require sexual reproduction: e.g., inclusive fitness. That's why spiteful mutants can be phenotypically successful under certain conditions.
In broad strokes, I do agree with the gist of your final couple paragraphs, though as you'd imagine by now, I come to such conclusions by a different route. As long our society remains highly space biased, it will be a breeding ground for the SMs. They're not going away until the conditions favoring their phenotypic strategy are gone -- including though hardly restricted to high prosperity. But of course explaining my reasons for such a claim would entail distilling here the arguments of a nearly 500 page book.
But as always your comments were engaging. Thank you.
I appreciate your patience. I have begun your book.
Thanks, Hamburger. I hope you find the book of value. I'm sure you'll have something thoughtful to say about it.
I agree that the proper response would be to affirm the autonomy (and dignity) of 'the family' while also creating a discplinary regime for 'professionals'.
But I would be remiss if I didn't point out the absence of the use of the phrase 'mental illness' in the discourse around 'trans' and LGBTQ'.
'Adult transitioners' are simply crazy people. If they thought they were Napolean, it would be more obvious what's wrong with them. But *academics* made this particular kind of insanity respectable.
Because of liberal (spatial) ideology, people think 'rights' inhere in persons and that assumption *requires* the bearer of such rights to be 'autonomous' and 'responsible for their actions'.
But that's simply a false presentation of reality.
The Left is correct when it proposed 'the personal is the political and the political is the personal'. At least it was correct in recognizing that there's no barrier to the effects *on others* that emanate from our actions.
The only option is to create communities of like-minded and like-acting persons and exclude those who are not inclined to conform to the values of 'the community'.
If all the people involved in 'adult transitions' had to live in their own communities *only* with people who are also 'adult transitioners' and their enablers, we could see whether or not their specific 'community values' would be capable of forming a sustainable community.
In brief, all liberalism follows the capitalist dictum of 'internalize the profits, externalize the costs' and such is the case with these spacialist 'communities' of deviance.
Hamburger, today and everyday.
The latter part of your comment is clearly an argument for a temporalist regime, such as I've explored here at length -- and will continue to do so in the immediate future. (Watch for the next series!) I think you do a fine job of identifying the values and norms that underpin such an outlook. Of course there's an interesting wrinkle with matters of mental illness in gemeinschaft contexts. The "village idiot" (whom I'm guessing could have been engaging in crossdressing behaviour in some situations) was often treated with dignity if not actual seriousness. In any case, they tended not to be pathologized, precisely due to the absence of a managerial class therapeutic infrastructure to provide such stigmatization.
But of course when we start invoking mental illness under the auspices of a spatialist regime, we run into the Foucault problem. Even if we can agree upon some kind of objective metric for measuring mental illness -- e.g., capacity for self care, evolutionary fitness -- interpretation of such a metric is always open to dispute. In the seemingly obvious case of capacity for self care, perhaps you're familiar with the anti-psychiatry movement associated to R.D. Lange, in which patients were allowed to wallow in their own filth (as I recall) under the conviction that this was a passage they had to complete to return to functional health: evidence that even an understanding of that seemingly obvious variable or metric can hardly be assumed to be universally taken as self evident.
And then of course, given the propensity to concept creep exhibited by the verbally dexterous managerial class, which we've all seen so much of in recent decades (e.g., racism, violence, hate), the risk of politicizing and weaponizing mental health diagnoses against the regime's self-identified enemies presents serious danger. The Soviet Union of course was infamous for this kind of thing, but we can hardly say it has been unheard of elsewhere.
So, while I understand your perspective on the mental illness side of the issue, personally I'm reluctant to empower managerial class bureaucratic paternalism with resort to those kinds of characterizations. Thanks so much for your contribution to the comments.
I agree and disagree with your summation. It’s been very one sided with the pro lgbtq+ movement basically being pushed hard onto everyone like it or not. I know parents are very upset with not being informed or even included in their own child’s life with major monumental decisions like changing genders taking place. My kids are grown but you can be sure I would have been very unhappy if my kids were young now so I think Danielle Smith’s approach is a very reasonable starting approach to finally offer some clear guidelines although nowhere near ready for legislation until the fall and nothing is perfect.
I don’t believe children are old enough or mature enough to make this life altering decision that will be with them for the rest of their lives and I know no one loves your kids quite like you do or as much as you do, the parents I mean, well intentioned tho they may be. You’ve got to ask yourself what percentage are genuine trans kids and what percentage are indoctrinated, I believe far more are indoctrinated so this push towards children changing genders has permanent and lifelong lasting consequences for them.
Sonya. You understood there was nothing in what I wrote endorsing the idea that the kids should be deciding?
I have no opinion on whether Smith's approach is reasonable or not. I'm just saying its not rightwing, in the sense that it doesn't promote temporalist values. In that it was a lost opportunity.
But I certainly agree that I'm happy that my kids aren't having to grow up amidst all this spiteful mutant nonsense. Though I do have a granddaughter to worry about now.
I guess what bothers me the most is how one sided this entire subject has felt and if you dare to disagree with it being pushed onto minors then you are labeled as anti trans. I have a trans son so no I’m most definitely not anti trans but when I said to him I did not agree with the way it was being pushed onto children he said he likewise didn’t understand the push towards children.
The best I have heard it explained is the Liberal party prior to Trudeau was just left of center but the Trudeau Liberals have now moved so far over to the left that what used to be considered the center has become considered now to be on the right or “far right” as you always hear.
I clearly have no expertise in politics nor history but I’m learning from recently having discovered Northern Perspective on YouTube regarding our Canadian politics and how they work.
I value your writing because you make me think about and look at things with an altogether different and much more complex perspective which is always a good thing!
So, do you actually think that parents should be given absolute authority over their children? Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but that's what your post sounded like to me. No amount of abuse would justify interference by the State, as far as you're concerned?
Irena. First, this substack is not a venue for me to promote my own mores and values. I keep those to myself. Second, abuse is a common denominator of human life. An abuse-free world is not an option, nor does such an imagined arcadia have anything to do with the tradeoffs that are at stake in the current historical situation. Thanks for your contribution to the comments.
Abuse does indeed occur in all human societies, as does murder for example. An abuse-free world is not possible, and neither is a murder-free world, but some societies have a lot more abuse/murder than others. The real question is: what do you do about it? An extreme right-wing position might indeed be that, as long as the perpetrators are the victim's parents, nothing at all should be done about it, just as an extreme left-wing position would be that parents shouldn't interfere with the raising of their own children. That's why extremes usually lead to hell.
Irena. Usually when people use this adjective "extreme" I'm not quite sure what is intended beyond some kind of emotional hyper-charging of the claim. Maybe we could tone down the emotional side of this by defaulting to the more generic terms I've developed: spatials and temporals (since left and right don't really make much sense prior to the French Revolution). I certainly agree under the hegemonic regime of either phenotype life is very bad for the other phenotype -- though obviously quite good for the one enjoying the hegemony. (So hell, as you put it, is a matter of perspective.) I'm even inclined to agree with Innis that there may be some kind of golden age along the arc from one phenotype's hegemony to the other's, when there's something of a balance in society between their dispositions. But as it came, that too must pass. Again, I'm just describing reality, not any preference on my part.
However, it might be worth mentioning a few further points. First of all there is no one on the the planet who is a more trustworthy and reliable custodian of a child than that child's biological parents. You might want to investigate the work of Margo Wilson and Martin Daly, who studied the data generated by child protection agencies across different jurisdictions. They found that in the case of family abuse of children the perpetrator in only a very tiny fraction of cases was a biological parent. Usually it was foster, adoptive, step, live-in common law "parents," or extended relatives. And as Wilson and Daly observe, if you have even the most passing understanding of evolutionary biology, this would be a very easy outcome to have predicted.
So if your sole or top priority is making a consequentialist case for protecting children, there's nothing better for them you can do than taking actions to assure they are with their biological parents; statistically its the best bet for their well-being. Again, that doesn't mean there are no biological parents who are evolutionary mistakes in terms of fitness. For the consequentialist argument, though, that very tiny number of harms then has to be weighed against the immense harms done to children by the state. Or more precisely the spatialist regime. Do I really need to list these for you?
And perhaps to clarify, it's useful to consider the matter of murder. Even under the contemporary spatialist regime, there's no standardized approach to dealing with murder. Canada has federal law against it applicable everywhere in the country. The United States does not. Instead, each state has its own law. At least in theory, a U.S. state could not have a law against murder if it chose. Likewise, if you look at temporalist regimes, there is considerable variety. In the Roman Republic, family's had absolute power of life and death over their own members. In many jurisdictions of Medieval Europe, even within families, murder was addressed through community procedures, grounded in customary law. Resolution of murder between families was an even more diverse situation, but that's getting us too far off course.
There's no single correct answer to the tragedies of human life. And at different arcs of the phenotype wars, different societies will find different solutions. And as times change, and we move across the next arc, such solutions likely will eventually be abandoned for others. And all this movement and choice is caught up in preferences and personality structures of the phenotypes that are gaining or losing power in the process. That's what I'm investigating here.
To clarify what I said last night. This substack is not about proselytizing; it aims at scholarship. To draw upon the famous Humean distinction between is and ought. My project here is to identify what is (or has been) extant and what thereby is possible. I leave what "ought to be" to the hot-take geniuses all over YouTube. Any particular social arrangement you find distasteful is entirely your business. I have no delusion that there is a tragic dimension to human life; nor am I deluded that either phenotype has a monopoly on that tragedy.
I hope that helps clarify my position and approach. Whether this is the right substack for you, of course, you'll have to decide from there. Again, thank you for your comment, and the opportunity to clarify some of these points.
In the particular context that I was using it in, "extreme" (maybe I should have written "fundamentalist") means "take an abstract principle and take it all the way to its logical conclusion." I cannot think of any example in which this does not lead to outcomes that a large majority of humans would find highly unpalatable.
In any case, "temporalist regimes" have one big disadvantage over "spatial" ones, in the sense that if your spatial neighbor can raise a large, highly disciplined army while you are incapable of doing the same, then you will be defeated, possibly killed or enslaved, and your space will end up being ruled by a foreign spatial regime. So, eventually, all human societies become "spatial," with the possible exception of those that live in highly inaccessible/undesirable areas (such as barren mountain tops). Is this reversible? Sure it is: all it takes are much lower population densities than our planet currently has. Much, much lower.
trains is a hard job.
Sounds like a case of editile dysfunction.