Over at Takimag, Christopher DeGroot is complaining about our modern culture of conformity and manipulation. This is today's America: where a guy like James Damore, who determines that the diversity emperor has no clothes, gets canned from Google, and Damore has a girlfriend
And are not the fearless thinkers and doers usually anathematized and humiliated? Start with the early pre-Protestant religious leaders, John Wycliffe (declared a heretic) and Jan Hus (executed). Then the textile innovators, attacked by the machine wreckers. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, hated by all good lefties. Hey, how about smart Jewish kid Michael Milken and his junk bonds. He went to jail for his sins. You don't muck around with the government's bond market without bending the knee, pal.
Of course when the enforcers actually start burning heretics, it is really just a sign that the ruling class is feeling a bit threatened, and needs to make an example of someone, pour encourager les autres. So, of course, James Damore had to be flayed and humiliated. You may not challenge the racism and sexism of the ruling class's "diversity and inclusion" racket if you know what is good for you. And of course James Damore's Good Little Girl girlfriend has made an appropriate kowtow to the household gods to keep her job.
Actually that's an important point. Good Little Girls are even less likely to challenge the status quo than Good Little Boys. There is something in every man that knows that It's All Bullshit, even as he behaves like a "good person" and "gets with the program, Jenkins." But my experience is that women are much less likely to think bad thoughts than men. Nothing remarkable here. Men have always been expected to take the bullet. But women need to stay alive and get their children to adulthood.
The thing about our era that makes it special is that, in between all the suffocating conformity, it actually does have a subculture of creativity and disobedience, in addition to the usual mono-culture of conformity and obedience. Of course, the people that imagine themselves the rebels and challengers of the status quo, your lefty friends, are in fact the most conformable Kates around.
As you know, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, we have a whole class of people, the People of the Creative Self, dedicated to the proposition that the only thing in the world is to be a writer or an artist thinking new thoughts. Of course, most of the People of the Creative Self are doing purely derivative stuff completely approved by the ruling class, and not really creative in any real sense. But at least the idea of creativity and breaking the mold is there.
I suspect, however, that the emergence of women into the public sphere in the last century has made it more difficult and more costly to be a rebel. You can see that on the university campus as lefty women combine to attack "campus rape" and "microaggressions." Women expect safety, physical and emotional, and they will weaponize their Culture of Complaint and make life difficult for you if they do not get it.
But hey. If you are a Real Man then you ought to have the cojones to be a rebel. And on this view, James Damore doesn't belong in an established tech company like Google. He oughta be working for a startup. And I dare say that, what with all the publicity and all, there are startups that are interested in hiring him.
In fact, maybe the whole Damore flap is his cunning plan to get his name out there as a rebel and get hired by some cool startup. How else are you going to get your name out there?
who doesn’t share his nonconformist views and who “does not want to be identified or directly quoted,” being “keen to remain in the shadows.”And, so DeGroot complains:
To be sure, it is now very difficult for people to understand the conformity and manipulation that lie behind America’s constant pseudo-moral show... To be a “good person” in 21st-century America, you must be a base dissembler, very eager and happy to carry out all sorts of meaningless and degrading tasks.Well, yes. But was it not ever thus? Does not everyone, in every time, need to put on a pseudo-moral show? And are we not always humiliated into the performance of "all sort of meaningless and degrading tasks" by the ruling class of the time?
And are not the fearless thinkers and doers usually anathematized and humiliated? Start with the early pre-Protestant religious leaders, John Wycliffe (declared a heretic) and Jan Hus (executed). Then the textile innovators, attacked by the machine wreckers. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, hated by all good lefties. Hey, how about smart Jewish kid Michael Milken and his junk bonds. He went to jail for his sins. You don't muck around with the government's bond market without bending the knee, pal.
Of course when the enforcers actually start burning heretics, it is really just a sign that the ruling class is feeling a bit threatened, and needs to make an example of someone, pour encourager les autres. So, of course, James Damore had to be flayed and humiliated. You may not challenge the racism and sexism of the ruling class's "diversity and inclusion" racket if you know what is good for you. And of course James Damore's Good Little Girl girlfriend has made an appropriate kowtow to the household gods to keep her job.
Actually that's an important point. Good Little Girls are even less likely to challenge the status quo than Good Little Boys. There is something in every man that knows that It's All Bullshit, even as he behaves like a "good person" and "gets with the program, Jenkins." But my experience is that women are much less likely to think bad thoughts than men. Nothing remarkable here. Men have always been expected to take the bullet. But women need to stay alive and get their children to adulthood.
The thing about our era that makes it special is that, in between all the suffocating conformity, it actually does have a subculture of creativity and disobedience, in addition to the usual mono-culture of conformity and obedience. Of course, the people that imagine themselves the rebels and challengers of the status quo, your lefty friends, are in fact the most conformable Kates around.
As you know, on my reductive Three Peoples theory, we have a whole class of people, the People of the Creative Self, dedicated to the proposition that the only thing in the world is to be a writer or an artist thinking new thoughts. Of course, most of the People of the Creative Self are doing purely derivative stuff completely approved by the ruling class, and not really creative in any real sense. But at least the idea of creativity and breaking the mold is there.
I suspect, however, that the emergence of women into the public sphere in the last century has made it more difficult and more costly to be a rebel. You can see that on the university campus as lefty women combine to attack "campus rape" and "microaggressions." Women expect safety, physical and emotional, and they will weaponize their Culture of Complaint and make life difficult for you if they do not get it.
But hey. If you are a Real Man then you ought to have the cojones to be a rebel. And on this view, James Damore doesn't belong in an established tech company like Google. He oughta be working for a startup. And I dare say that, what with all the publicity and all, there are startups that are interested in hiring him.
In fact, maybe the whole Damore flap is his cunning plan to get his name out there as a rebel and get hired by some cool startup. How else are you going to get your name out there?
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