The Infinitely Pliable Shit Shield

A meditation on rights.

One of the best psychologically tonic, politically skeptical and philosophically consistent stories I’ve read this year was written by Mark Bisone. Check it out and pack a lunch. Don’t click now, you’ll go down a rabbit hole. Stay here for a minute.

Mike Hind has the real provocation for today’s Stoic observation. It has to do with the following rumination about cows.

Knowing that they're destined for a much harsher life, presumably as calf and milk producers, I always wonder whether it would have been better had they never lived at all.

One of the least persuasive arguments I sometimes hear about the ethics of beef and dairy is but they wouldn't exist at all, otherwise.

What's interesting about this point is the assumption that there is positive value in a life.

That if a life exists, that's automatically a net positive.

I asked myself a tangential question about animal rights and for me it came down to purpose. Can I defend the right of a dog to be a bartender? No, that is not the dog's purpose. Can we humans have a large number of explicit rights to be defended? No, that would give 3rd parties too much power over us, trading off {taxes, attention, loyalty, independence} to pay for our sense of entitlement to all of those enumerated rights.

Dogs die. Cows die. People die. If we catalog and count these deaths as Acts of God, in other words, that which cannot be helped except by extreme and expensive preventative measures, then we have a more reasonable set of hazards for which we might give guidance or even guarantees. So always remember this. No insurance company could remain solvent if it weren’t for Acts of God. Which raises an interesting question set: Do socialist governments allow insurance companies? Really? Why?

In a universe where shit happens, what is a reasonably sized shit shield?

Hind artfully identifies The Sneering:

It's the predominant tone popular with liberal 'intelligentsia' which is used when discussing the talking points of those who won't conform to the ideology. It's designed to shut you up. Reduce your confidence to speak, when you notice things.

It's a sneering scornfulness. A world-weary they just don't get it kind of vibe. They in this case being the 'ordinary' or 'little' people.

What's amusing about this sneering is that, for me, it reeks of a kind of intellectual blindness and laziness. An unwillingness to engage in the harder work of understanding as opposed to knowing stuff. These people tend to have lots of instrumental knowledge but manifest next to nothing in the way of wisdom.

The sneering comes from people who believe we (WEIRDos) can fund VCs to build infinitely pliant and expandable shit-shields. Saying some death or suffering is "God's will" is anathema to them. They love billionaires because they believe billionaires can buy such shields today. They hate billionaires and capitalism because these dainty people have internalized the interrogational skills of deconstruction, but nothing so infused with hope other than to bring the whole tent down on the circus they envision society to be. It gets tiresome deconstructing the motivations of Leftists despite my genuine sympathy for those who wake up from being Woke.

The meaning of life is to survive the pain.

In order to survive it, you have to learn it, endure through it. Understand and trust the value of that endurance. Recognize that it’s your ability to deal with it, and not heap it upon yourself, that gets you through it. And once having suffered the pain of transition from terror to triumph, in reflection upon your prior self, do be generous. Learning and growing are difficult. Don’t hate your own previous ignorance, but be patient. This will give you forbearance for others. So you must share your battle scars. Testify.

No I don’t want to look at the new tattoo around your navel. I don’t want to hear a sorry story centered about your self-inflicted pain. I don’t want to hear how angry you are at the world for being a dangerous place full of pain and suffering. I want you to acknowledge that life can be a shit swamp and it’s hard to swim through it, but there are islands of comfort in the midst of it all. Look, you have found one. Rest your bones and catch your breath, but then sing. Sing aloud with cheer. You have gotten through it. You have found joy on the shores of a meek island surrounded by swamp. If the Universe didn’t want us to feel pain, why do we all have nerves? To feel it. To know it. To recognize our path from it as we discover the joy of triumph.

An Ecology of Purpose
The alleviation of pain is not the purpose of civilization. The purpose of civilization is to standardize and communicate how to deal with the inevitability of pain and suffering. In other words the purpose of civilization is to sustain culture. When we lose the ability to sustain the efforts to grow strengths, that’s when we become uncivilized. This comes down to virtue and vice again.

Is life automatically a net positive? Well, human life, according to humans is valued at X. What does the Earth care about human life? I think we go back to purpose. What is Earth’s purpose for human life? Is it to raise cattle? Is it to make plastic bottles? What is God’s purpose for human life? What is the Universe’s purpose for human life? Perhaps it is a conceit that we can make that determination, busy as we are dealing with our own actual lives. Lucky is the one who makes a wager on the purpose they select for themselves and manages that well enough. Hubris is everywhere else, since so many of us think we can determine the purpose for others as well.

But yeah we domesticated beef, but not buffalo. We ride horses, not zebra. We eat chickpeas not holly. Some people eat dandelions. Go figure. Are all of those natural resources here for a purpose? I think we improvise. We improvise with intuition. Remember the first person to wade into brackish water, pull out mussel, crack it open and eat the insides was probably a teenage boy on a dare. It worked out. That’s the triple threat: humor, reason and discovery. Emphasis on these three aspects of human capability is the point of this entire Stoic Observational enterprise. So let’s take a breath and then continue.

Culture, Society & Civilization
You may have surmised that I skipped from the meaning of life to whether or not our civilization is gaining or failing. Well let’s take a brief look at some detail.

The purpose of culture is to show you how to avoid, endure and survive the inevitable pains of your time and place; also how to attract, enjoy and share the edifications of your time and place. 

I’m not going to unpack that much here except to say that I think of cultures as best practices that are revealed in societies. Again, our capabilities of humor, reason and discovery are generative of cultural practice. Cultures operate within the complex adaptive dynamic systems of societies. We can grab hold of cultural norms and practices without having much of a clue as to what’s going on in the whole of our society. Societies, especially large ones have economies and grasping the dynamism of economics is a greased pig chase at best. Societies have moving zeitgeists and sometimes a large number of cultures. Societies are not generally accountable to themselves. They cannot be predicted. That is why we abstract into cultures - with any luck a dominant culture in a society can be maintained over several generations with more or less consistency. Yet eventually cultures fail. The standards of respect, the symbols of dignity, the modes of communications, the expectations of institutions the intuitions of common sense fail to shield us from the shit. Who complains the loudest? The new money of course. And of course as they try to maintain their tendentious grips on their positions in society they close off or otherwise modify their cultural avenues.

Margin Call illustrates, at least in this scene, how even the best practices of a culture get blindsided by the inevitability of shit. Suddenly a culture of pain avoidance can no longer play in its own familiar backyard. Societies are that complex. The shield is to be first, be smarter or to cheat. Yet it is not infinitely pliable. All of this action was prompted by a discovery. So now they must reason their way forward and they may laugh about it down the line. If they survive this Act of God, their culture may never be the same again. Cows die. Dogs die. People die. Society rolls on. Which rights can be defended? Nobody in the room can afford to sneer. They don’t just know stuff. They understand.

So now I reiterate.

The alleviation of pain is not the purpose of civilization. The purpose of civilization is to standardize and communicate how to deal with the inevitability of pain and suffering. In other words the purpose of civilization is to sustain culture. A culture needs the backbone of civilizational infrastructure, so that the praxis of a culture survives multiple generations - a culture that adjusts to the change of society’s circumstances - a culture whose dynamism openly edifies and inspires human creativity.

But a culture that closes up its avenues cannot sustain the traffic of multiple generations. It abandons discovery. It abandons humor. It abandons reason. We go straight to Ted Lasso playing darts. You’ve seen this?

To gin up demand for an infinitely pliable shit shield is to defy reckoning with pain. This is the measure by which I view our society’s largest demands. And aside from the fact that we arrogantly presume that we can aggregate all of our various cultures and alleviate all of their various pains, the shit finds a way inside the bubble.

• Can we fix the entire climate?

• Can some plurality of us leave the planet?

• Can we create and manage AGI?

• Can we establish a coherent secular northstar?

• Can we cure our societal addictions to drugs?

• Can we define a coherent plethora of genders?

• Can we end violent conflict?

For the record, I believe we can harness AGI and be purposeful about it but I don’t believe we can eliminate the gaming of it for nefarious purposes. I simply believe with all the enticements of the Ruling and Genius classes, that they will become satisfied with their winning exploits that are sufficiently baffling to the Peasants. Then like everyone in history who wins, they will sing That’s Just The Way It Is. Because it takes too much energy to break the business models and subcultures they developed on the strength of the lack of skepticism of the Peasants. Then again, everybody gets caught out. The universe and Acts of God have very large numbers of shit generating variables. Like the shit politics that have failed to create incentivize and sustain nuclear power generation. You know. Atoms for Peace.

The Problem Restated
In conclusion this is my framework for identifying the various elements of change. There are political, ideological forces in society which are attempting to overrule and re-prioritize cultures by flattening them and asserting that the value of their dynamism is only expressed in political power. Again this where multiculturalism has gone completely wrong and against cultural edification towards cultural weaponization and cultural warfare. It is a war waged with emotions untethered to facts and history. It is a populist war where fame triumphs over integrity. It is a top down war in which elites blithely migrate their loyalties to whichever social justice memes go viral regardless of logical, moral and ethical inconsistencies. From these soggy heights they encourage and condone censorship and other illiberal & anti-democratic practices. They also promise infinitely pliable shit shields in their faux placation of the masses, many of whom are suckered into these economies of seduction.

It reminds me of the story of a poor pregnant woman who in 2007 pledged her support for candidate Obama because she believed he would, when elected, get her free pre-natal care and a free hospital to deliver her baby. Dorothy searching for the Wizard of Oz.

To win is to find strength within.