It’s often called the “sheepdog mentality” but I prefer to swap out “mentality” for “delusion”: The basic idea is that there are three types of people: the vast majority of people are sheep, (fundamentally harmless and fairly useless) who are preyed upon by wolves (bad people) and must be protected by sheepdogs (“good guys” who are willing to use violence.)
Read MoreI label this process “Copization,” to parallel it to the evolutionary biology phenomenon of “carcinization”: there are a complex of evolutionary pressures that lead ten-legged arthropods to develop into remarkably crab-like forms. Copization, on the other hand, is the phenomenon whereby genre stories that feature violence as a central component have a tendency to evolve into a form that more closely resembles a police procedural.
Read MoreThe “media”, if it wants anything, wants as much of your attention as it can effectively extract for the lowest investment possible. More than any conspiracy theory about bad actors, more than any lie about modifying people’s behavior, more than anything else, this should be recognized as the root of the problem.
Read MoreBefore I really get going on the speculation, though, I want to talk about the end-of-history fallacy. There is a tendency to assume that the present state of affairs is somehow the final form of the world, that history is the story of how this current moment emerged. But the monstrosity of our current moment is making this harder and harder to swallow: the covers have been ripped off and we can see the poorly-made Rube Goldberg machine of history for what it is.
Read MoreThe country is on fire.
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