The mainstream media tells you the stories aren’t true, but true Patriots know they’re lying. We’ve seen it with Aurora, Colorado, where even the police department is in the pockets of the Democrat Party, saying Venezuelan gangs aren’t the new landlords of every apartment building in town. We’ve seen it with Springfield, Ohio, where the city’s spokesperson—clearly a victim of the Woke Mind Virus—denied reports that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets. But, Patriots, every one of us knows someone who knows someone whose cat disappeared in or around or one or two states over from Springfield.
What’s worse, Aurora and Springfield aren’t the only stories of dangerous waves of immigrants the media and their Democrat Party masters are doing everything in their swamp power to keep hidden. Have you heard of Innsmouth, Massachusetts? No? You should. Because what’s going on there is the most horrifying story of all.
Recently, a boatload of mysterious strangers has landed on the shores of this sleepy little fishing village, and they're straight outta a horror movie. These newcomers, hailing from some far-flung Pacific island nobody’s ever heard of, are turning Innsmouth upside down.
Locals are buzzing with tales of bizarre rituals, creepy ceremonies held under the moonlight, and the unsettling fact that these newcomers all bear an uncanny resemblance to one another. It's like they’re all part of some secret club, and true Patriots are definitely not invited.
The once-thriving fishing industry? Gone belly-up. Now, the docks are deserted during the day, but come nightfall, there's a flurry of suspicious activity. Whispers of shady deals and strange cargo being unloaded under the cover of darkness have everyone on edge.
Old-timers like Ezra Marsh, who's seen it all, are sounding the alarm. “The town elders sold us out,” he says. “They promised us prosperity, but all we got was a one-way ticket to the Twilight Zone.”
And it’s not just the adults. These newcomers are breeding like rabbits! Their kids, pale-skinned and wide-eyed, are flooding the schools. Parents are terrified, and who can blame them? These kids are… different. They keep to themselves, they speak in hushed tones, and their eyes seem to follow you wherever you go.
Remember those good old days, with the annual summer festivals and bustling church gatherings? Forget about it. The festivals have been canceled, the church pews are empty. The whole town feels like it’s under a spell, and the only ones thriving are these enigmatic newcomers.
Now, some folks are calling us bigots, but we’re just trying to protect our home! These newcomers are secretive, they have strange dietary habits (seriously, what’s with all the seaweed?), and they seem to avoid sunlight like it’s the plague. Something’s not right, and it's not just paranoia.
Innsmouth is changing, and not for the better. The quaint charm is gone, replaced by an atmosphere of unease and suspicion. Did we make a deal with the devil for a few extra tourist dollars? Only time will tell, but one thing’s for sure: This town will never be the same. The shadow of these newcomers looms large, and we can only wonder what dark secrets they're hiding beneath the waves.
Very scary stuff, indeed. If the mainstream media and the Democrat Party won’t tell America what’s happening in Innsmouth, and why it’s just another reason we need to Build the Wall, it’s up to you, true Patriot, to get the truth out. Call JD Vance. Get on X and tell Ted Cruz. Don’t let the Democrat Party steal another election. We need Donald Trump to fight back against whatever is happening, and it sure is fishy, in Innsmouth—and across America.
Note: For anyone who didn’t pick up on it (hi, Newsmax fans!), this is satire. There are no Deep Ones in Innsmouth, there are no pet eating Haitians in Springfield, and there’s now uptick in Venezuelan gang activity in Aurora (which I live ten minutes from and has many pleasant attractions I encourage you to check out). That said, I do hope JD Vance reads this and warns the MAGA faithful to avoid the shores of Massachusetts.
Becca Farsace is a talented young video producer who, until recently, worked for The Verge, a technology journalism website. She’s now gone solo, and put out a video explaining why. It’s worth watching. Farsace is open and honest about the challenges and loneliness of remote work, and the friction creative people can feel in large organizations. Her reasons for leaving The Verge are good ones.
But they’re not reasons that make The Verge look bad, even though that’s a narrative spinning up in some corners. She wanted independence, and control and ownership of her creative output, and she couldn’t get it within The Verge right now. That, by itself, is unremarkable—even if Farsace’s talents are. What’s interesting about the narrative framing isn’t the particulars of Farsace’s leaving her employer for the better part of a decade for something new, but rather how the framing reflects the way people tend to view networks and markets from a narrowly focused and static perspective, a perspective that obfuscates many of the benefits of dynamic markets as networks, instead of as individual transactions.
As an example of this narrative, here’s Liz Kelly Nelson, writing about the departure: “What the trend in video makers leaving brands to be in control of their content, and their destiny, tells us, though, is that media companies may need to rethink their willingness to share ownership, and profits, with the highly creative content producers like Becca Farsace for whom the old rules just aren’t good enough anymore.” When Nelson shared this post on Threads, she added, “What does it mean when the networks that invest in growing strong talent just can’t seem to hold onto them?”
I was struck by the wording. The Verge failed to hold on to Farsace, true. But did the network that grew her talent? It depends on how broadly you zoom out, and how expansively you think about what it means for a network to invest and to benefit.
The Verge is a business, and it operates in the market—broadly, but also in the narrower market for technology news and analysis. The Verge hired Farsace because, as a business, it expected earn more from having her on staff (e.g., from advertising revenue on the videos she produced) than it cost to have her (her salary, benefits, and use of various other corporate resources). And it’s possible, in making the decision to hire a 22 year old, that they expected the balance there to not be in their favor for some time. Young and inexperienced workers are typically paid less than their older and more experienced colleagues because they are less productive. They produce less value for their employer on, say, a per hour basis than someone who’s been doing it longer and has developed their skills. So when you’re hiring young and inexperienced employees, you’re typically banking on them becoming more productive as their skills develop.
But it is also the case, when you hire young people fresh out of college, that you’re unlikely to have them forever. Very few of us stay with the same employer from just after graduation through retirement. Part of that is when you’re fresh out of college, you’re still figuring yourself out, and still working through what it is you actually want to do long term. Maybe you switch industries entirely. Maybe you just decided that, while you thought you wanted to shoot videos, what you in fact really want to do is manage a production team—and there’s not an opening at your current employer. Or, as in Farsace’s case, you decide you’d like to strike out on your own.
That this latter happened doesn’t mean The Verge has screwed up in retaining talent. Or, at least, it’s not ipso facto evidence of that on its own. Some employers are bad at talent retention because, for example, they’re toxic workplaces or don't pay well, and so when employees grow their skills enough to have other options, they jump ship. But it doesn’t sound like that’s what happened at The Verge. Instead, Farsace’s talent outgrew what The Verge could reasonably offer her.
And, as someone with a lot of experience hiring and managing young people fresh out of college, let me tell you that, when you’re a manager and that happens, it’s actually pretty awesome. You obviously want to keep great people, because great people contribute greatly, and they’re also usually a lot of fun to work with. But you can’t always do it, because an organization has needs beyond “keep everyone who’s great,” and so keeping them would mean either giving up things you can’t give up, or it means doing that person a disservice. Because if you’re a good manager of young talent, your first responsibility is to be their biggest fan. You want them to succeed and to grow. That benefits your organization while they’re there, yes, and so managing them well, from the perspective of the organization’s interests, means giving them what they need—including direction and mentorship—to achieve it.
But you also want them to succeed even if that success means outgrowing what it is you can offer them. The first reason for this is ethical. It’s good to want others to succeed, and it’s good to delight when they do so. I’ve accomplished a lot in my career, and have many personal accomplishments I’m proud of, but nothing has made me prouder than when a young person I gave their first career opportunity to goes on to awesome things. I’ve had interns or first job employees who are now prominent think tank scholars and tenured professors. That’s incredible and rewarding, and I couldn’t be happier for them—and they wouldn’t have done it if I’d “retained” their talent. Because, at the time they were ready to take that next step, I didn’t have a path available that would get them to where they had decided they wanted to be, or where they ultimately deserved to be. To begrudge them leaving, or to see it as a failure of the organization I was with at the time, would’ve been to fail to take seriously my role as their mentor, friend, and biggest fan.
The second reason gets to the problem with framing a situation like Farsace leaving The Verge as “the networks that invest in growing strong talent” failing when they don’t “hold onto them.” Because “the network” isn’t The Verge, it’s the pool of talent in video production, and the pool of talent for organizations like The Verge. When you invest in young talent, you benefit your company for as long as you have that talent on staff, and you benefit that young talent by paying them a wage and helping them develop their skills. But you also create positive externalities. Other people, who aren’t you or your organization or the employee herself, benefit from that investment. That employee is creating products of value to others (many, many people love the videos Farsace made for The Verge), and they will continue to create value wherever they go next.
“But that’s not value for us,” you might think. If we invest in someone and they leave, sure they’re creating value elsewhere, but we’re not gaining from it. And that’s true, if you take that narrow perspective. If all you look at is the immediate transaction between you and the employee, or between your customers and that employee’s output. If you zoom out, however, and think about “the network,” then you recognize that you’re not the only one doing such talent development. Whoever ends up landing that person when they leave, or whoever benefits from their solo output, is gaining value. Because you’re part of that network, if you cultivate a culture of developing young talent and cheering them on as they grow, then you’ll be able be able to find new talent yourself that has been similarly developed in other organizations sharing a similar culture and values. When Nilay Patel, Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, celebrate’s Farsace’s new solo venture, he’s not just doing right by her, he’s contributing by example to a community that will bring him and his organization talent in the near and long term, and is telling future Becca Farsaces that The Verge is a great place to get your start.
So one way to read Farsace’s exit is that The Verge was incapable of holding on to a talented contributor. That’s the static and narrow view. The other is to focus on The Verge giving a young and raw talent a place to earn a living while developing her skills to the point where she could strike out on her own, and then publicly cheering her doing so, and that this contributes very much to the network The Verge is a part of and benefits from. That’s the dynamic and broad view.
Markets are such powerful forces for good because they give us incentives to blur the line between self-regarding actions and other-regarding ones. It was in The Verge’s interests to hire Farsace when they did. It wasn’t an act of charity. But by following that interest, they launched the career of a tremendous talent, and contributed to a network that will do more of the same. This wasn’t a failure, but the best kind of success.
Twitter was always small compared to other social networks, even before Elon Musk got his hands on it. But it punched way above its weight in terms of the cultural center of mass. There were two reasons for it. First, while Facebook was where the ordinary folks hung out, and Instagram where you’d find the celebrities, Twitter was where journalists and “thought leaders” spent their time. Many of their conversations on the platform were downstream of more obscure corners of the Internet, like web forums and various sub-Reddits, but Twitter was where the big discussions that shaped the news happened, or at least the big conversations among the people who were responsible for everyone else’s picture of the news. Second, even if you weren’t a journalist or thought leader, if you were the sort of people who wanted to follow their conversations and lend your voice to them, Twitter’s where you went.
These combined meant that Twitter was where “The Discourse” was, and if you wanted to see what was happening in “The Discourse,” you went to Twitter. Being active on Twitter, even being exclusively active there, allowed you to keep your finger on the pulse of the national conversation to a reasonably expansive degree—or at least to a much greater degree than spending the bulk of your time anywhere else.
But then Musk came along, and Twitter changed. Musk himself, as the most prominent user of the renamed X, pushes a line that isn’t representative of where America’s national conversation is at, but rather a narrow, (proto)fascist, white nationalist sliver of that conversation. And he dragged the community along with him. A while back, I wrote about how the structure of social media—the way you follow people to construct a single “feed,” instead of participating in distinct rooms or forums—tricks us into thinking the slice of a platform’s users we’re regularly seeing, and the slice of the platforms conversation we’re regularly watching and participating in, is much more representative of the whole than it in reality is.
The hard-right turn of Twitter/X as a platform made this worse. And it’s made it worse because many of those journalists and thought leaders who’ve remained—even though doing so, and contributing value to Musk’s ventures and furthering his interests, is clearly an immoral act—haven’t recognized or come to terms with that turn. They spent years using Twitter from a perspective of “this is representative,” and still hold to that. They still believe X is the national conversation, that it is America’s water cooler, when in fact it’s no more those things than Trump’s Truth Social platform.
That the broader conversation on X is functionally indistinguishable, both in its content and the character of many of its participants, from Truth Social interacts in troubling ways with the perception, by those still-active journalists and thought leaders, that X remains what Twitter once was: a more or less representative picture of the wider discourse.
First, there’s an internal, deleterious impact. Who you associate with matters, not just because the people you associate with is a reflection of your own character, but also because the people you associate with shape your character. We cultivate our ethical perspective in collaboration with others, and if those we collaborate with are unethical, we’ll shift in that direction, too. Thus if our thought leadership is mostly interacting with the kind of hard-right and profoundly immoral perspectives of the community Elon Musk has cultivated and promoted, and is reflected in electoral politics by people like JD Vance, then this is bad for those thought leaders, because to the extent it makes them increasingly unethical, in both values and the way they see the world, it makes their own lives worse. You can’t lead a good life as a bad person.
Second, there’s an external, and also deleterious, impact. Because these thought leaders are increasingly acculturated to, and accepting of, the narrow and unethical perspective representative of the X community—but not representative of America generally—and because they mistakenly believe that perspective to be relatively mainstream, in their role as thought leaders—as columnists, podcasters, influencers, public intellectuals—they will promote that broken ethical view back to people outside of the X bubble. X still punches above its (diminishing) weight the way Twitter did.
The first step to a solution is for the journalists, pundits, and thought leaders still active on X, and who still stick to it as their primary or exclusive platform, to leave. They don’t need to decamp to more broadly representative platforms, because the fragmentation of social media means those don’t really exist anymore. But they should decamp to more ethical platforms, so that they’re not inculcating—in themselves and then, through their work, the rest of us—a system of values, and a moral and epistemic perspective, harmful to flourishing, a functioning culture, and a healthy democracy.
On the podcast, I had a conversation with political theorist Jacob T. Levy about liberalism and pluralism. I brought up a topic I talk about often when making not just the moral case for liberalism, but when discussing the relationship between liberalism (as a system of values in addition to a set of rules for political institutions) and wellbeing and the good life.
Jacob pushed back by noting that self-authorship, as a standard, is effectively too demanding. I gave a stab at an answer to Jacob’s concern in the podcast, and I encourage you to listen to it, but I wanted to raise another way to think about what self-authorship means, and hopefully one that makes it seem considerably less demanding than it sometimes gets presented.
We can think about “too demanding” in this case as meaning both of two somewhat distinct things. First, self-authorship is too demanding in that it asks more of many of us than we are capable of. This is the sense in which taking calculus when you haven’t yet learned algebra, or competing in Olympic breakdancing when you barely begun to internalize the craft, demands too much of you. Even if you want to do well, you lack the internal capacity to achieve that.
The second way is to shift the focus to the act of “demanding” itself. I might demand you do something that you’re capable of—that you have the capacity to accomplish—but you don’t want to do it. Maybe it’s not your jam, and you’ve got other things you’d rather put your time into. Or maybe you have external constraints, such as prior commitments, that interfere, and that you aren’t willing to trade off. Even if you have the internal capacity to achieve it, you lack the willingness to do so.
Some time ago, I listened to an interview with a philosopher about the idea of alienation. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the philosopher’s name, or where the interview was, so I can’t track it down now. But the idea that stood out to me—or at least the idea as I now recall it, which might be somewhat different from what was expressed—was this: A choice we make in our lives can be said to be self-authored or freely chosen if, upon looking back on it at some future date and with full knowledge of everything that went into us making that decision, we don’t feel alienated from it.
Imagine you’ve live for decades what you might label a “traditional” lifestyle, or a religious fundamentalist one, or as a committed Marxist-Leninist. This feels, to you, like who you are. You don’t feel alienated from yourself, because being trad or fundamentalist or Marxist-Leninist feels natural. But then imagine you discover that, from an early age, you’d actually been brainwashed into this perspective. You’d been given drugs that made you more malleable to indoctrination. Each time you’d shown any disinclination to continue this lifestyle, you’d been beaten or drugged again or cut off from all sources of alternative ways of being—and your memories of those interventions somehow suppressed. You discover all of this, in an indisputable way. There’s a good chance your reaction would be anger, but it would be anger informed in part by a sense of alienation from the person you thought you were. That person would suddenly feel inauthentic.
Now imagine that you’ve lived that sort of lifestyle and always wondered if it was really who you are. And then you instead receive confirmation, whatever it happens to look like, you in fact had opportunities to try other ways of being, or to explore other perspectives, and each time you decided to stick with what you already had, and that sticking with it was a fully informed, fully conscience, fully authentic choice. In that case, you might wonder what you life might’ve been like if you’d opted to forge yourself into someone other than who you are today, but you wouldn’t feel alienated from the person you are.
When we talk about self-authorship in a liberal society, and contrast its lack in less liberal societies, we shouldn’t frame it as “the business of constant self-recreation about everything,” as Jacob put it. It’s not a demand of self-authorship in the second sense above. Rather, liberal self-authorship is a means to avoid the alienation of discovering who you’ve been isn’t really who you are, or who you’d have liked to have been if you’d had the choice. And so it’s not like the first sense, either. Because liberal self-authorship doesn’t ask of you something you can’t do. Rather, it says, if you can and if you want to, you should have the option to, and society should support you in that.
You might've noticed a renewed focus with the latest ReImagining Liberty episodes. The show's tagline says it's about "radical liberalism," and I've been dedicating more of the episodes to digging into what that means. My conversation with Janet Bufton looked at liberalism as emancipation, and today's show looks at liberalism as pluralism.
And I'm particularly excited because this was an opportunity to finally get Jacob T. Levy on the show. Not only did he write the book on the topic, but Jacob is one of my favorite contemporary political thinkers. Check out our conversation here:
The episode coming after Jacob's, which you can listen to right now if you're an early access supporter, is on liberalism and progressivism. Much of ReImagining Liberty critiques the political and cultural right, for obvious reasons. I don't buy into both-sides-ing at all, and reject the faux-resonablness of pretending the contemporary American left is somehow just as anti-liberal as the contemporary authoritarian Trumpist right. But that doesn't mean there aren't significant problems with the progressive left, both in terms of its own anti-liberal tendencies, and the way its lack of skepticism about state power lead it to prefer policies counter-productive to its own emancipatory aims. I'm joined by Samantha Hancox-Li, writer, game designer, and associate editor at Liberal Currents.
We discuss what it means to be liberal, and how that's distinct from being a progressive. Then we talk about what liberals can learn from progressives, and where progressives go wrong in matching their political actions to their values. It's a conversation about political engagement, political rhetoric, and the right way to change the world.
If you're an early access supporter, you have access to that episode already. If you're not, and want to listen today, instead of waiting two weeks, click here to learn more about early access.
I'm taking a short break from politics and philosophy to talk about another topic related to this ReImagining Liberty newsletter. Namely, newsletters. The Internet is a very nifty communication medium, but how we interface with it is always shifting, and the shift to newsletters now has an element of saturation. And part of that, I suspect, is newsletter fatigue.
Let me tell a story about how what's old is new again, and how in this case, what's old is better.
Like many of us, you probably have newsletter fatigue. Some years ago, all of your favorite writers launched Substacks, every day more are starting newsletters, and while you want to keep up with them, every new subscription means another email a week (at least!) clogging your Gmail or Outlook inbox, and competing for attention with the emails you actually need to read and respond.
Given how many newsletters there are that you'd like to keep track of and ideally read, wouldn't it be cool if instead of getting them all in Gmail, you had a single, nice app they just showed up in, and you could quickly browse through them, read them in a clean interface, save ones you like, and share the ones you particularly like?
That's the way things used to be. Except, back then, we didn't call them "newsletters," but instead "blogs," though they amounted to the same thing. And in those glory days, there was an app called Google Reader that let you subscribe to your favorite blogs and aggregate them all in one place. It was glorious—even if the user interface, in those earlier days of the web, wasn't quite as pretty as what we're not used it.
When Google killed Google Readers, there was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, because it was such a beloved way to "consume" frequent, longer form web content from a variety of writers.
But here's the thing: What made Google Reader great wasn't Google reader, it was a web technology called RSS. "Really Simple Syndication" sat behind the scenes on all those blogs, and gave tools like Google Reader a standardized and simple way to pull in the blog's posts, format them, and display them alongside other subscriptions. And, even when Google Reader died, RSS didn't go anywhere. You can still find plenty of "feed reader" apps, many of them much nicer than Google Reader ever was. On the web, I have a soft spot for Inoreader, but Feedly is nice too. On the desktop, if you've got a Mac, Reeder is gorgeous (and it looks like a new version is in the works), but a search of the Mac App Store for "feed reader" will turn up plenty more. (I haven't used a PC in 25 years, so I can't speak to that, but I'm sure there are lots of great ones.)
And here's the other thing: Every one of those newsletters you subscribe to? (Or almost every one?) It still has an RSS feed. Substack publications do. And most any feed reader (see above) that you download will have a nifty feature where if you drop the web address of the newsletter in, it'll find the feed for you.
What this means is if you're feeling newsletter fatigue, there's an easy fix, and it doesn't mean subscribing to fewer newsletters. In fact, a good feed reader will make it a breeze to follow and skim through even more than you're (probably) already subscribed to. (Think of it like following a bunch of people on social media, except that each one won't post anywhere near as frequently.)
So play around with different feed readers to find one you like. Most all will let you export a list of your subscriptions, and then most all will let you import such a list, which makes it easy to try several and move between them without the tedium of resubscribing to each newsletter you want. And grab the RSS feeds of all your favorite newsletters, and if your reader can't find them automatically, if you Google "[newsletter platform] RSS feed," chances are you'll get a page explaining where it is. (If you don't know which platform your favorite writer is using, it's typically listed in the footer of newsletter emails.)
And if you're fatigued by emails from this newsletter, first, I'm sorry. But, second, maybe make mine the first RSS feed you drop into your shiny new reader app. Here it is:
The right routinely tells untrue horror stories about the state of America’s cities because the state of America’s cities—thriving, dynamic, and inclusive centers of culture and engines of economic activity—serves as a dispositive rebuttal of a fundamental right-wing narrative: that “traditional” values (and hierarchies and power structures) are necessary for people to flourish.
If you listen to the American right, our cities are unlivable hellscapes of crime and despair. If you listen to people who live in our cities, they’re actually pretty great. But the right is committed to an argument that without strong churches at the center the community, without strong traditional values, and without a strong sense of one’s place in a “natural” hierarchy, you can’t have a functioning society or a flourishing people. They argue that you need society organized around right-wing preferences for society to function.
But anyone who has lived in a dense and socially liberal city has first hand experience that this simply isn’t true. They’ve seen how strong, supporting, and endearing a culture of diversity, pluralism, religious diversity and secularism, and self-authorship can be.
Thus the right lies about cities, knowing they are the perfect counterexample to their claims. They have to construct a narrative that city culture doesn’t work, and then convince their tribe to believe it. They have to claim that “unity,” by which they mean cultural monism grounded in right-wing values and tastes, is necessary for people to have strong and committed identities, and that strong and committed (and unchosen) identities are necessary for people to psychologically thrive. But life for most who live in cities isn’t a hollowed out sense of self and crushing anomie. Rather, it’s a thriving and overlapping diversity of identities and ways of belonging, among which you can choose, instead of having them forced upon you, against your will and psychological well-being, by power structures and privileged positions of a “traditionalist” monoculture.
Yes, cities have relatively higher crime rates overall, but density does that. And much city crime is attributable, such as in Denver where I live, to homelessness and lack of sufficient care for those suffering from mental health issues, and both aren’t the result of liberal values, but instead the imposition of specifically conservative cultural values. Namely, NIMBYism (the demand that one’s neighborhood remain static in a particularly reactionary and closed way), the stigma affixed to mental health, and an ethnocentric refusal to allow immigrants to participate in the economy.
The reason right-wing media is so dedicated to pushing false pictures of what it’s like to live in dense and cosmopolitan areas is because America’s cities are the wildly successful alternative to what the right-wing insists is the only possible successful world.
As America gets closer to putting an authoritarian back into power, and this time with the legwork done to genuinely dissolve our democracy and liberal institutions in the name of populism, nationalism, and right-wing grievance politics, lots of very serious people are maintaining a position that reactionary populism is not that bad or that the other guys aren’t any better. This is, by any objective measure, nonsense. But it’s compelling nonsense to plenty of quite smart people.
Why?
Here’s a common line of thinking that goes a fair way to explain it.
To be thoughtful and wise is to be above the fray.
To be above the fray is to be non-partisan.
To be non-partisan is to not favor one side over the other.
To not favor one side over the other is to be equally critical of both sides.
To be equally critical of both sides is to view both sides as equal in their badness.
To view both sides as equal in their badness is to not admit when one side is clearly worse.
To not admit that one side is clearly worse is to understate the badness of the worse side or to overstate the badness of the less bad side.
This has as much traction as it does, among the quarters that it does, in part because, for much of recent memory, it was possible to argue that the sides differed primarily in their policy preferences, and each side had some good policies and some bad. And so being thoughtful and wise (and above the fray, etc.) was to simply point out when those individual policies were good or when they were bad. (Or, in a specifically journalistic context, to focus your attention on the horserace: Which side was winning and why.)
But with the GOP’s turn to the hard-right, and with its clear and explicit efforts to undermine basic institutions like free and fair elections, the peaceful transfer of power, and a general commitment to a pluralistic and open society, this old framework breaks down. Yes, both sides have some good policies and some bad, but the far-right, which has become the mainstream right, wants to undo the democratic process in which those policies used to get made.
America is on the cusp of becoming a very dark place, and it might be tempting to pretend that away in order to maintain a sense of above-the-fray-ness. But right now all our thoughtfulness and wisdom needs to instead be directed at protecting our very democracy—so we can have the opportunity to argue about good and bad policies in the future.
I talk about ethics a lot around these parts, but realized I don’t have a go-to post explaining what I mean by the term. This is particularly important, because I use “ethics” as distinct from “morality,” while most of us treat them as synonyms. Defining terms matters when we’re thinking philosophically, so let’s correct that omission.
What is ethics? Most simply, it’s the set of principles (values, perspectives, beliefs, rules, character traits, etc.) that help us to live well. And “well” here doesn’t just mean, say, “pleasurably.” We can hedonistically enjoy ourselves while being unethical, or we can find pleasure in activities that are actually harmful, to ourselves or others. No, to live well means to be happy, to flourish, and to do so in a way that is admirable and blameless.
Morality, on the other hand, is about how we ought to act towards others. This makes morality part of ethics. Namely, the part that tells you how you should interact with other people. Or, typically, what the guidelines are for how not to interact with other people. Don’t hit them. Don’t steal from them. Don’t violate their rights or cause them unjustified harm.
This makes morality is other-regarding and action-focused. Ethics–which, again, is the broader concept within which morality is a part–is both other and self-regarding, and focuses not just on action, but also values, beliefs, and perspective.
It is thus possible to be moral, in the sense of behaving properly towards others, while being unethical, in the sense of still holding to values, beliefs, and perspectives that are harmful to one’s self (even if you aren’t aware of that), and lead to a world that is harmful towards others as well.
It is not possible to be ethical while being immoral. Ethics is the big picture of the kind of person you are, and so to say “I’m ethical, but also immoral” is incoherent. It would be like saying, “I’m good at playing baseball, but also I don’t know how to catch a ball.”
Moral theories–i.e., theories that give us clear rules for how to assess what action is right or wrong in a given circumstance–are never complete or perfectly guiding, either descriptively or normatively sense, in that we can always think of edge cases that break them. This is what Trolly Problems are all about. They’re descriptively imperfect in that no single set of rules or principles captures the whole of how we think about and judge moral questions, but will instead inevitably contain ambiguities. And they’re normatively imperfect in that no single set of rules or principles can give us actionable and correct guidance in every possible situation, because the world is more complex than the set of rules, and so there will inevitably be situations where we have to rely on judgement outside of the rote application of those rules.
This is part of why we need ethics. The values, perspectives, and beliefs that being ethical entails cultivating are what help us in those edge cases, where moral rules are unclear. If we focus on being ethical, we can be relatively confident that, in morally challenging situations, we will behave well. Or, at least, will behave more admirably than the person who hadn’t bothered to cultivate those traits of character, or who has internalized unethical values, perspectives, and beliefs.
Ethics is the whole ballgame. It’s how we live well, and how we do so in a way that is compatible with, and supportive of, everyone else doing the same.
It can be difficult to get a handle on just how bad our contemporary political environment has become and, more so, why. Everything just feels broken and so much of it driven not by a clash of philosophies, but instead by the rise and celebration of profoundly ugly values.
But it’s not just about ugly values. Yes, there are people out there who openly relish and venerate the worst behaviors and beliefs, and do so out of a self-conscious commitment to being the kind of person most of us, rightly, find unlikeable: Internet trolls, edgelords, dull comedians, duller fringe media figures, etc. We all know someone who hates the world and wants the world to hate them right back.
It’s tempting to view everyone who’s given into the ugliness as falling into that camp. To believe they know exactly what they’ve become, and what they’re demanding the country become along with them. But that’s a mistake. Most of them, if you ask, won’t readily admit the badness of their values, not like the trolls, edgelords, comedians, and fringe media figures will. Instead, they’ll genuinely view themselves as good and upstanding. Maybe a bit flawed, too, but who isn’t? Still, what’s worse, they’ll say, is what everyone else has become. Any ugliness they embrace in the political sphere is just a necessary feature of the kind of person or policy needed to push back on this cultural corruption, this drift away from how things used to be, back when the country had traditional values and not whatever it is we have today.
While I think it’s clear that quite a lot of those “traditional” values were themselves corrupt, and that social progress has come from abandoning them and the domination and hierarchies they insisted upon and reinforced, it’s important to note that it doesn’t feel that way to the people who hold fast to them. To understand how there can be that disconnect–how bad values can seem to the holder like good values–we need to introduce the idea of wholesome and unwholesome perspectives.
A perspective is how you see and make sense of the world and your place in it, and that seeing and making sense of isn’t just a product of the information you take in, but the attitudes and preferences, conscious or unconscious, you apply in working out the meaning of, and your response to, that information. If you are disposed to fearfulness, for example, then behaviors you see others engaging in will appear to you more threatening and worrying than if you are disposed to a more comfortable and contented perspective. And this can then lead you to lash out at harmless difference and benign change, and make you more susceptible to political leaders promising to use their authority to put a stop to it.
We can’t fully separate values and perspective, because they each form the other. The values you bring to understanding yourself and your world will inform what you find relevant, worthy of emphasis, or worthy of concern when you’re processing the environment around you–or what you’re hearing about that environment from television, politicians, and so on. At the same time, the perspective through which you view the world and yourself will lead you into habits of thought and behavior that dissolve, solidify, or shape the values you come to view as worth pursuing, cultivating, maintaining, or abandoning.
In particular, when I look out at the worst features of our political and social culture, the perspective I see dominating is one of aversion and clinging. It’s a perspective that says, “I don’t like this, and need to push it very far away, put a stop to it, or destroy it entirely.” And it’s a perspective that says, “I like this, and so demand that it dominate not just my life, but everyone else’s, and that it never change.” Taken together, these create a broader perspective of illiberalism, of seeing diversity, dynamism, individual choice, and social change not as features of freedom worth celebrating, but as threats to the one true and worthy way of life.
The trouble with this perspective of aversion and clinging isn’t just that it encourages you to behave badly towards people different from you, and to want to take away their freedom to live that difference in a peaceful way, but also that it leads to misery for yourself. It might feel like aversion and clinging are actually just the holding fast to old sources of wisdom and tried and true social arrangements and status rankings. But, as I’ve argued at length in another essay, they demand of the world what it cannot give. This perspective insists upon stasis, when everything is constantly in a state of change. And that disconnect between the way so many want the world to be and the way the world actually, inevitably, is then just creates needless suffering for the person unwilling to give up their aversion and clinging, and trapped in the ignorance of believing they can keep them while somehow achieving happiness.
Fortunately, we can change our perspective, and we can cultivate better values. It’s challenging. But if we are to live together and flourish, we have no choice.
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