Recently the Gothenburg Book fair opened its door and among the children’s section an interesting book was spotted with the title “Grandpa has four wives”. The book is targeted to three to six-year-old kids and the summary of the book is this:
“Asli has never been to Somalia but now she will finally visit with her dad where she will get to meet her grandpa and all his wives.”
I am not a book burner so if someone wants to publish this kind of book then they are obviously free to do so. The ironic part here is that many libraries in Sweden have been cleaning out classic Swedish children books because they use, what is now, considered derogatory terms for minorities, at the same time they buy books like the above. It is hard to navigate the political correct terrain. It didn’t take long for a debate article to appear questioning monogamy and trying to portray traditional relations as damaging for women. I am sure women are very liberated in polygamous marriages in the middle east! I don’t want the government to be involved in marriage what so ever so marry as many men or women as you want, but don’t pretend there isn’t other issues involved here!
The economist and author Tino Sanandaji has a few examples of book titles we should look forward to reading after we are finished with “Grandpa has four wives”:
My sister had a boyfriend, now he doesn’t exist anymore.
Daddy knows a kind social security lady and now he has three apartments.
Little sister just turned 9 years old, now she will get married.
Mom is dads cousin.
Grandpa helps the cops and is running Gothenburg.
There are now 132 known cases in Sweden of men married with little girls. The Swedish law is such that it is not legal to marry a child in Sweden, but if the “couple” is married outside of the country and then comes here it is a-ok! On one hand, we have a government that wants to censor the internet to prevent pedophilia and on the other, we give social security to pedophiles just as long as they have married their victim outside of the country. Sounds legit.
“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law,” said Rudd.
The full force of the law, in this case, would be 15 years in jail for reading the wrong content. Given now everything left of Marx is “far-right” propaganda in today’s climate I am sure we can all imagine how that will end. Just another way to try and shut down alternative media.
So we see that in the UK they want to sentence people to 15 years in prison if they browse the wrong content, contrast that with the sentence for gang rape in Sweden. Two Afghani men, one 17 years old and the other 18 years old, gang-raped a 16-year-old girl. Tingsrätten (local court) sentenced one of them to 10 months in a youth prison and the other to one year and 10 months in prison and they where both to be deported to Afghanistan after their sentences are served. Now the Hovrätt (one step above Tingsrätt) decided that the older of the two should not be deported because they think the crime he committed is not rough enough that it warrants risking his life by sending him back. I am curious, what crime is worse than gang-raping a 16-year-old and frankly why should we spend a single second thinking about the safety of a person that commits such crimes?
Somewhat of an interesting trend has started where municipality refuses to comply with the state. They don’t do it out of some ideological purity but simply because the state is dumping its problems on the municipalities. The Swedish migration authority is initially responsible for asylum seekers, they can place them wherever they feel like and the municipalities cannot refuse. When the asylum seeker gets a residence permit they become the municipalities responsibility and economic burden. Some towns are in the situation now that they can not possibly welcome any more people. They are even renting hotels and buying flats just to have somewhere to house anyone. Well now some towns are saying no, they won’t provide any financial support anymore and they don’t even have any more possible places for accommodation, Hultsfred is one of those municipalities.
A situation where the municipalities go against the state and willfully break the law has, as far as I know, never been seen before. It will be highly interesting to see what the government does. Consider it perhaps the Swedish version of state nullification.
This is a rather funny article. After age testing a bunch of supposedly young asylum seekers the migration authority figured out many of them have lied about their age and they are in fact, adults. The migration authority will thus send them back, this sparked a group of activists to snap pictures of themselves holding a sign saying “send me instead”. The news page “Nya Tider”, a page critical towards immigration, found a way to troll these people. If you can offer a job to one of those asylum seekers they will get a residency permit, Nya Tider called up the activists one by one with an interesting offer. The news page will hire one of the asylum seekers if the activists agree to take a one-way ticket to Afghanistan and settle there. They quite literally offer to send them instead. You won’t be surprised to know that not a single one of the activists was interested in that offer. Troll lever over 9000?
This is one of those cases where Sweden should be renamed Absurdistan. New “art” is now displayed on the walls of four subway stations in Stockholm. The art consists of naked old men and menstruating women. I guess further comments are not necessary?
This is just to highlight how left the Swedish right is. The center party tries to market themselves as a freedom leaning liberal’ish (in the old sense of the word, not American liberal) kind of party. Well, they just decided that they are not interested in removing the government monopoly on the sale of Alcohol. What is the justification?
Vi vill inte utsätta svenska folket för det experimentet. Därför tycker vi att detaljandelsmonopolet i Systembolaget är en jätteviktig del i svenskt folkhälsoarbete, sade Anders W Jonsson.
That statement can be roughly translated as this:
We don’t want to expose the Swedish people to that experiment. Because of that we think the alcohol monopoly is a crucial part of the Swedish public health policy.
An experiment is an interesting way of describing a long overdue normalization with most of the rest of the world.
Sweden is an interesting country right now and I have the privilege and misfortune of being a Swede living in Sweden. Everyone has talked about my country recently, from Trump to Molyneux so why not join the chorus? Instead of doing some long-winded summary of the path that led us here, the details of which I don’t know enough about anyway, I will just describe what is happening right now mixed with some personal experiences, I will reuse some of the articles I mentioned in my previous post.
The major issue plaguing Sweden is the breakdown of law and order, violent crimes are on an increasing trajectory and our society is simply not prepared for it. Here is a handful of the more alarming news from the last few weeks (all articles are in Swedish but can be fairly well comprehended if put through google translate).
The police have lost control over certain suburbs and are reduced to begging the local immigrant clan leaders to do something about the violence. The article describes how the police kindly ask the clan leader for help and the leader replies he will “talk to the family”, it is like something straight out of the Godfather. (Aftonbladet)
There are now so many murders and attempted murders that the police has to put aside the ever-increasing number of rape investigations in order to prioritize the murders. Given that child rapists only get a few months prison sentence, perhaps it is best not to bother investigating rape in the first place? (Expressen, Aftonbladet)
A family living in Malmö, the city that is furthest in its decay, are the victims of an attempted home invasion. When the father asks the police officer what he can do to be safe and protect his family the officer replies (powerlessly) that he should move to another city because the increase in crime is beyond their ability to contain. (SvD)
In one part of Sweden, one single police patrol car is available in an area roughly the size of a quarter of Florida. (SVT)
That is in no way a complete coverage of the news, it is just the articles I have reluctantly read to stay on top of what is happening. Sometimes being an ostrich is more comforting.
In the first article, a police officer clearly states.
One has to realize that in these neighborhoods the police does not have a monopoly on violence. People that fail to understand this has blinds over their eyes. We have to adapt to reality and work according to it. People that don’t understand this lives in a political dream world. Says Walter Holm.
The authorities have given up and individual police officers are trying to sound the alarm, it might seem odd to cry about that on an anarchist site but we are in the unfortunate situation where self-defense, or acting to defend others, is punished severely at the same time as the state no longer even keeps up the appearance of maintaining order. Just look at these cases.
Man sentenced for manslaughter after shooting in self-defense (Aftonbladet)
Man sentenced to one year in prison after interrupting an attack (Aftonbladet)
Man hit a burglar with one blow too much, sentenced to five years in prison (Dagens Juridik)
In Sweden, if you need to defend yourself you have to stay utterly calm and not use one iota more violence than what is “necessary”. If you do use “too much” violence your sentence will often be harsher than the sentence given to the person who attacked you. Despite our stringent weapon laws, even pepper spray is illegal, it is technically allowed to own a gun for self-defense, or hunting and sports. However the cops are responsible for granting gun licenses and they are open about the fact that they don’t care about the law, they will do whatever they can to prevent law-abiding citizens from exercising their legal right to own firearms. (Cornucopia)
So how do we Swedes react to this? By and large not at all as far as I can tell. Even with articles like the ones I link to above, where the police openly admit to the biggest newspaper in Sweden that they lost control, we still act like nothing is wrong. It is happening too quickly to really grasp. I hear no talk about it at work, no serious debate among friends, no heated discussion in the cafeterias. Up until very recently this development was hidden away and only written about in “alternative media”, back then it was easy for everyone to say that it is just racist delusions and conspiracy theories. The racist accusations are of course still thrown around on anyone that wants to discuss the situation soberly, but the accusations are getting more and more hollow. Everyone is still cautious about being branded as a racist though and most just keep quiet. Since the middle class isn’t for the most part personally affected yet it is still easy to believe it isn’t so bad after all.
Some people, like Tino Sanandaji, are relentlessly pushing out the news and the statistics, making it impossible for those of us that follow him to stick our head in the sand. He shows that rape, murder, shootings, robbery, pretty much all violent crimes are on an exponential trajectory and no one can dismiss his numbers. My own personal experience with any crime is limited, just petty crimes like bike thefts and break-ins and vandalism in a cottage I own, so despite reading the statistics, I can still believe it isn’t so bad.
I do have some limited experience with a no-go zone. Someone in my family used to live close to one of the worst ghettos in Gothenburg, I lived there as well for a year in 2003. Back then it was not exactly the most pleasant place in the world, but neither was I afraid to walk around at night. After I moved away from the area a kiosk next to the tram stop got robbed multiple times, in one of those robberies the owner got murdered. When I visited Gothenburg this summer I could read in the news that cars on the parking next to where I used lived was set on fire. That area certainly got worse and I am very relieved that no one I know lives there anymore.
I would lie if I didn’t say the trends here isn’t seriously making me consider leaving the country. Perhaps the issues will mostly be contained to the no-go zones, or perhaps they won’t. I wouldn’t know where to move though, I love Sweden. I love the nature, I love the endless forests, the million tiny lakes and the peaceful and majestic mountains. Most of all I love to live in a society where people trust each other on a very fundamental, perhaps naive, level. Swedes have always managed with few cops and a subpar legal system, to say the least, while maintaining a low crime rate because we form a high trust society. How long can that trust survive in the present conditions though? If we lose that trust how long will it take to rebuild? Will it ever be rebuilt?
The people that believe Sweden is rich and prosperous due to social democracy have no clue, Sweden is prosperous because Swedes are the way we are, as Nima Sanadaji nicely explores in his book Debunking Utopia: Exposing the Myth of Nordic Socialism. If the trust culture breaks how long does it take until society as a whole suffers from it? It is easier to tear down something than it is to rebuild it and I don’t see how to make Swedens future bright.
This isn’t a post about solutions or a deep analysis of the problem, just a snapshot of the current situation from my view. Iceland feels like an ever more appealing country to move to.
I am going to do a bit of an experiment and share news from Sweden a couple of times a week and summarise what the articles are about. The links will point to articles written in Swedish but google translate does a pretty decent job of it anyway if you want to double check what I write! So let’s get right to it!
The original Swedish title is very meek and can be translated as “Police allows clan leaders to resolve conflicts”. That’s mighty nice of the police, sounds like a win-win situation. Maybe there are some strapping youngsters that get into innocent youthful bouts of fisticuffs every now and then and the police let the locals deal with such minor nuisances? Unfortunately when one reads the article it is blatantly clear that the police has simply capitulated. The content of the article should by all means shock every single Swede reading it, it describes how the police in certain Swedish cities have to go to local clan leaders in order to try and handle the violence in the ghetto suburbs. The police simply can no longer fight the violence by themselves. It is not about “allowing” anyone to do anything, they have no other choice. The article describes how the police approach the clan leader with requests and the leader replies that he will talk to the family and see what he can do. Like straight out of the Godfather.
Near the end of the article a police officer says this:
Man måste inse att i de här områdena har inte polisen ett våldsmonopol. Förstår man inte det har man någonting för ögonen som skymmer. Och vi måste anpassa oss till verkligheten och jobba efter den. Förstår man inte det här lever man i en politisk drömvärld, säger Walter Holm.
The translation of that is something like this (bold parts added by me):
One has to realize that in these neighborhoods the police does not have a monopoly on violence. People that fail to understand this has blinds over their eyes. We have to adapt to reality and work according to it. People that don’t understand this lives in a political dream world. Says Walter Holm.
Wow! Just wow. Let this fully sink in, a representative of the states violent enforcement agency is publicly admitting that they have been outgunned and he does so in the clearest and plainest way imaginable. He even goes so far as to call anyone that thinks otherwise a blind idiot. Think about it, how bad is it really until a police admit such a thing? As we know the monopoly on violence within a territory is pretty much the definition of a state, the state admits its defeat within certain parts of Sweden! I am a voluntarist so that by itself doesn’t shake me, what scares me is the thing that has replaced the state within those areas. Not much of a victory when one group of violent thugs is replaced by an even worse group of violent thugs.
Antalet mord och mordförsök gör att polisen måste prioritera bort andra typer av brott – som våldtäkter och andra typer av sexövergrepp, skriver SVT Nyheter.
Translation of that is:
The high number of murders and murder attempts forces the cops to down-prioritize other types of crime – such as rape and other types of sexual assults.
Ok, let’s just say wow again. There is a very concerning increase in both murder and rapes in Sweden and now it has gotten so bad that rape cases simply cannot be investigated anymore because all resources are consumed by murder cases.
I don’t think I need to proselytize more on that topic, let’s just quickly jump to article number three.
Here I don’t even need to quote the article, the headline says it all. To give some context, southern Lappland is an area that is about a quarter of the size of Florida. Granted the population is nowhere near a quarter of Floridas population but that doesn’t change the fact that if you call the cops it might take several hours with the pedal to the metal before they even arrive. Check this out on Google maps, the distance between two randomly selected towns in the region. How much of a deterrent against home invasion, theft, robbery, break-ins etc do you think one single lonely police car is in such an area?
There is one very interesting thing about the articles above, they are all published in mainstream media. The last link is even to the state-run media service. Just a year or two ago news like these would only be found on alternative media sites and anyone stating such things in polite society would be ostracized and called a conspiracy theoretician or racist. Things are changing very rapidly now in every way in this country and no one is really grasping it. The weird thing is that people are still not going “WTF?!?” after reading these kinds of articles. I hear no real serious discussion around me about the decay of law and order. To put a melodramatic spin on it, sometimes it feels like the scene in Titanic with the band playing while the ship is sinking. I am not quite that pessimistic but reality sure is absurd.
I guess that is enough for the first post of this kind, stay tuned!
The article is in Swedish but Google translates usually does a passable job nowadays with Swedish to English translations. The title really says everything you need to know though, in Sweden it is outlawed to spontaneously start dancing anywhere. This is not just an archaic toothless law either, the cops have actually, this very summer, pressed charges against restaurants that have the gall to allow the patrons to move their hips rhythmically to the music. A suggestion to scrap this law recently went before the Riksdag but they are stalling and want to investigate whether removing the law might increase the risk of public disorder and jeopardize safety. I am not shitting you, in a country where violent crime is on an absurdly increasing trajectory, where rape is getting out of hand and where there are more and more “no-go” zones, the politicians seriously think cops should spend their time making sure people don’t dance without a permit!
I can imagine the work. The cops are sitting there undercover in a corner, observing the guests and trying to estimate if someone is approaching that danger zone between plain moving and moving to the music. Did she shake the hips a bit too much? Were that guy’s spastic gestures a dance move or just a display of social awkwardness? Did she drop it like it was hot or did she just reach down to pick something up? If I were a cop I would rather do that than to infiltrate some violent jihadist gang or hells Angels that’s for sure!
What about other crucial questions, does the dance attempt have to actually follow the rhythm of the music or do we white guys get a pass because our moves are more akin to seizures than dancing? For how long does the movement have to go on to be considered dancing? When I am just walking around I likely, by pure accident, move my behind in sync to the tunes at least once. Should an officer of the law approach me and say:
“Sorry, sir, you hips are moving so tantalizingly that we just have to arrest you! I can feel my trouser snake arousing and we just can’t let you go around like that encouraging moral depravity.”
We obviously can’t have any of that for goodness sake, the slightest tolerance of dancing without state permission clearly leads to moral decay, sodomy, and outburst of violent crime! If that is your thing then pack your bags and move to Somalia, you anarchist!
Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy is a series of books that has stuck in my mind ever since I read them back in the fall of 2014. It hit so many buttons for me mentally that it feels like a book I could have written (if I could write!) and given its popularity I am apparently not the only one touched by it. I will even go out on a limb and say it is a defining epos of our time. Explaining why will involve a bit of a detour so tag along!
I am no historian of fantasy but it is obvious to me that fantasy has been getting darker. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones) might have been the popular turning point, it amped up the realism and cynicism to a new level. In the books the “heroes” are fallible and morally corrupt, they do good things out of selfish motives and few have any moral standard they try to uphold. The villains are sadistic yet uncomfortably relatable and the main characters get slaughtered or die in trivial ways without any mercy given to the reader. If a character happens to be good and decent they more often than not end up getting impaled by a few feet of steel, goodness is equated with naivety in Martin’s world and naivety gets you killed mighty fast.
Martin has inspired a lot of followers, the foremost in my mind is Joe Abercrombie’s The First Law trilogy. Abercrombie keeps a lighter tone and cranks up the situational humor, but the themes of his books are pitch black. Abercrombie completely subverts the traditional hero trope, by the end you realize the heroes you have been cheering for are horrid, even worse than the villains. Abercrombie’s more recent young adult series, Shattered Sea, is just as bleak and the end makes you really despise some of the heroes. There are very few characters one can admire for their moral standards, everything is pretty much dark shades of gray except for a few bright light.
There are other authors that nail the dark mood, Morgan’s A Land Fit for Heroes, for instance, is one that falls somewhere in between Martin and Abercrombie, Morgan’s heroes are rather heroic but jaded due to how the world has treated them, the world itself is incredibly grim and hardly worth fighting or dying for.
The current state of the genre is darkness, heroes are far from role models and villains are ordinary flawed people thrust into dark situations. It is bleak, it is gritty and perhaps it is realistic. The darker parts of our nature are celebrated and larger themes like good vs evil are brushed aside or used only to show that humans capacity for evil is equal to any monsters. The books do have some kind of grand goal or fight though. In A Song of Ice and Fire, the white walkers seem to be pure forces of destruction and mayhem without any redeeming quality, in The First Law there is an evil wizard and his army, in A Land Fit for Heroes the world faces invasion. In those books, despicable things are done but there is some greater purpose (well, perhaps not in the Shattered Sea). The storylines are epic but the characters flawed.
Then we turn our eyes on The Magicians. The Magicians takes that darkness and boosts it, it is in some ways a deeper tale. Grossman uncannily captures the mindset of someone severely depressed. On the surface, the storyline is an adult version of Harry Potter mixed with Narnia. You have a bunch of gifted kids in a school of magic that ends up battling an evil wizard. That entire storyline is just a backdrop to the real fight though, the struggle against the bleak and pointless existence itself, how to find meaning in a world without meaning. I suspect that Grossman has struggled with depression in his life because it takes someone that has lived through it to write such a book and perhaps it takes a reader that has experienced it to fully appreciate the book. I have never encountered writing so infused with nihilism and bleakness while at the same time remaining entertaining and readable. Perhaps it is my own multi-year journey through depression that enables to me fully enjoy the book and identify with the protagonist so much. I would warn anyone currently in such a state of mind to avoid the book though because it sure won’t make you happier.
The entire series is a rollercoaster where we follow the protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, as he time and again encounters some purpose to his existence just to inevitably find that it, in the end, feels just as pointless as anything else. Even the death of his father is treated as a cold and distant event that barely touches him. Other characters in the book suffer far worse fates than Quentin, there is rape, mutilation, death and things worse than death. While those events motivate or drive the other characters to revenge or just overcoming the odds Quentin is simply slipping down into his depression. He is often an observer of the madness unfolding around him while he tries to make sense of why he is there and his own insignificance in the grand scheme of things. The triviality of his personal problems contrasted with to the horror around him demonstrates the reality of depression, it is not always a rational response to horrific events.
So why is this book series a defining epos of our time? I only started thinking in those terms when I heard Jordan B Peterson talk about what Nietzsche meant with “God is dead”. Nietzsche was afraid of what humanity will do when we lose the external purpose to our existence, a fear that isn’t easy to discount. We now live in a world defined by moral and cultural relativism, where you are not supposed to hold any values over any other, where secularity has replaced God and where death is the end and nothing you do can change that. In such a world it is very hard to find a sense of purpose, we are after all just a bag of chemicals clinging to a rock in an uncaring universe whose complexity exceeds our capability of understanding. Grossman takes all those feelings and distills them into the Magicians, reading it and the rest of the books in the series is like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex. If you are a person who seeks external motivation than The Magicians is a crushing book.
Believing is perhaps “easier”, but belief is no longer a natural part for many in the western world. God is dead and it is up to us to find a meaning. Some throw themselves into fantasies, some devote their life to ideology, some put a gun into their mouth and some bafflingly don’t need any reason to just enjoy life. The Magicians ruthlessly examines the question of purpose and it will certainly touch anyone that has spent any time asking “why”. Just don’t expect to find any answers in the book, the book shows that purpose is something you create for yourself and no matter how grand your external life is you will never be happy if you don’t get the motivation from within.
I don’t think I will face much opposition when making the claim that two of the most interesting thinkers in the world today is Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Jordan B Peterson. Regardless if you agree with them or not you have to admit both of them have an impact. Taleb has been a prolific writer for many years while Peterson has only recently become an internet sensation. Both of them challenges the status quo within their respective fields but neither is trapped within their domain, they think far and wide and are incredibly well read. Neither one of them has ever bored me, regardless of how distant the topic is from my usual interests. If anything they make every topic they approach appear so compelling that I immediately expand my reading list by a dozen books. I think Taleb alone is responsible for at least 20+ books on my kindle that I have to read.
On the surface Taleb and Peterson are nothing alike. Taleb is a mathematician and trader. He is brash, arrogant and acerbic and lashes out at people for the slightest thing. He is a tremendous author but, to be honest, a sometimes rather incoherent speaker. He is a skilled mathematician but never loses track of the ability to, in writing, clearly express ideas with words alone. His primary topic is fragility (or lack thereof) in complex systems and based on that work he draws far-reaching conclusions about the most down to earth issues. One moment he can be writing about the fragility of the global financial system, the other he is explaining why a taxi driver has a more robust career than a typical middle class office worker.
Taleb’s main drawback is his abrasiveness, he is so quick with the insults and attacks on anyone that disagrees that it is hard to know what point he is trying to make. That behavior has given him an internet following consisting of sycophants that are rather tedious as well. One might ask how much of that behavior is acting though given that he is in a position, as he explores in his books, where pretty much any publicity is good publicity.
I don’t necessarily agree with everything he writes, but everything he writes is certainly worth reading. His books The Black Swan and Antifragile are fantastic and I am very much looking forward to his next book. Be warned though that with Taleb there is an “easing in” period. When reading his books one doesn’t instantly “get it” and in some cases, one might even be compelled to step back and call him a charlatan. He rips apart models without giving better models because his whole point is that in many cases you can not make predictive models at all. That is a hard pill to swallow, especially for engineering types like myself that love to calculate everything. It took me a long time to come around to those concepts in The Black Swan.
Peterson, in contrast, is humble, often openly emotional but always logical and a fantastic speaker (I have yet to read his written works so I can’t comment on his authorship). I can listen to his videos and podcasts for hours without ever getting bored. He is a psychologist and historian that focuses a lot on the psychological meaning of religious symbolism, but it is clear he has thought deep and hard about an assortment of other issues. Many of his views seem to, in one way or another, boil down to the psychological and societal consequences of the lack of an ethical/moral compass after “God died”. His recent climb to fame is based on his relentless fight against restrictions on free speech brought about by the postmodernist identity movement. That fight has expanded into an all out defense of the foundations of western civilization.
What is so fascinating to me, and the reason I lump them together here is that they, despite their disparate backgrounds and personalities, essentially draws the same conclusions on various topics. Especially the value they both put in religion. Both of them seem to be either atheist or so unorthodoxly religious that one would not identify them as religious in any traditional sense. Despite that, they both think religion plays a crucial role in the world and shun the view that it is obvious that a secular world would be a better one.
Peterson has come to religion from a mythological point of view. He has studied the mythology of religion, what the stories tell us about our psyche, how it gives rules and purpose to our lives and how it has been crucial for the development of the modern world. A world which rests on a foundation of Christianity that is so deeply rooted in the fabric of our society that we don’t even recognize it anymore. The culmination for Christianity in his view is the idea that the individual has a value that can not be willy nilly sacrificed for the collective, an idea which is perhaps the very foundation of Western Society. Note that Peterson makes no statement that religious mythology is true or not, he thinks it has a value regardless.
Taleb approaches religion in a slightly different way which can be summarized by the Lindy Effect. The Lindy Effect is the observation that the longer an idea has survived, in say the form of a book, the higher the probability that it will survive at least that timespan further into the future. In essence, the older an idea gets the higher its probability of surviving even longer. Taleb speculates that the cause of the Lindy effect is that ideas that survive for a long time have utility, useless ideas are discarded and useful ones stick. Crucially, just like Peterson, Taleb doesn’t think an idea has to be true for it to be useful. Simply put usefulness trumps truth. Survival determines utility, not truth. Just uprooting traditions and beliefs that have survived millennia is not a good idea, especially not if it is enforced from the top down.
Both of them recognizes that if we just remove religion the mind will latch itself onto other types of beliefs that might be far worse, for instance, socialism and naive rationalism. Peterson thinks the horrible socialist experiments in the soviet union and nazi Germany would not have been possible without the vacuum left by the sudden removal of religion.
I have always been a rather militant atheist, but I have to admit that Taleb and Peterson have radically changed the way I think about these things. In turn that made me receptive to Tom Woods excellent book How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, a book I probably would not have fully appreciated just a few years ago. The content of that book fully lives up to its title and it is an excellent work that needs to be part of the history education of any curious mind. Like Taleb say, the existence of God is such a minuscule part of religion. If one completely focuses on the question whether or not religion is true, as most atheists do, one completely misses the role and importance of religion as guidelines on how to survive and prosper.
Like Taleb say, the existence of God is such a minuscule part of religion. If one completely focuses on the question whether or not religion is true, as most atheists do, one completely misses the role and importance of religion as guidelines on how to survive and prosper. Petersons is trying to bring into consciousness all the things we have subconsciously assimilated from our religious foundation so that we can separate it from the supernatural and preserve it in our secular world. He repeatedly makes the point that all our moral values are the result of millennia of Christianity and we can not just assume that we will maintain those values naturally now that we are no longer Christian.
This post is getting long enough and I am still just barely scratching the surface on what those two has to offer. Taleb’s books were the impetus for me to slowly give up any remnants of social democratic ideas that still festered in my mind after the Swedish school systems rather successful indoctrination. Taleb clearly explains that big systems are fragile and that small is beautiful, especially in the realm of human affairs. It is hard to make a stronger utilitarian case for libertarianism, especially considering that Taleb isn’t even being overtly ideological. I don’t think Taleb is a full blown anarchist, he refuses to be put into any ideological box, but it seems to me like if one takes his ideas to the logical endpoint anarchy is where one ends up. Maybe he doesn’t find anarchism Lindy proof? On a more trivial level, but still important, Taleb’s work utterly changed the way I think of the safety culture within the nuclear industry. I work in the nuclear field and for a long time I was yet another “safety first” drone that mumbled the mantras without really thinking deeply about what safety really means.
Peterson has a wealth of free material and lectures on mental health, happiness, how to live a fulfilling life, goal setting and a variety of other topics. I haven’t even begun to process most of what I have learned from him yet, he gives you pieces of advice you can incorporate into your life right here and now. I can already tell his works will fundamentally change how I approach life and I already bought into his self-authoring program. Peterson’s dissemination of the flaws of postmodernism isn’t really the most interesting work he is doing, but it is perhaps the most important work. It explains a lot of what one observes in the political world today. Getting at least a shallow understanding of postmodernist ideas is a must to at all be able to comprehend how progressives think and act.
In summary, if you are looking for some intellectually stimulating material then give either one of them a chance. The depth and clarity of their thinking and their refusal to simplify complex topics or bow to political correctness is utterly refreshing after a steady diet of shallow IFLS pop-science profiles like Dawkins, degGrass Tyson and similar. If I were to compare them to anyone it would be to Freeman Dyson. Dyson’s books are also gems, especially Disturbing the Universe, but Dyson doesn’t have any coherent philosophy behind his idea, he just present great interesting insights into various things he has encountered through his long and interesting life.
For me, the hallmark of a great speaker or writer is how much ideas they generate in my mind. When I listen to Peterson or read Taleb I frequently have to pause and just spend some with all the branches of thoughts and ideas that their work triggers in my mind. So go ahead and buy their books, read their articles, listen to their podcasts and interviews and let a million thoughts spring to life!
It is hard to find good videos of Taleb that do him justice but I liked this one.
. If the trust culture breaks how long does it take until society as a whole suffers from it? It is easier to tear down something than it is to rebuild it and I don’t see how to make Swedens future bright.
