tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post6505850810906545361..comments2024-03-28T15:48:11.151-04:00Comments on The Philosopher's Stone: POLLSRobert Paul Wolffhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-74752118126189518362018-07-21T18:06:18.639-04:002018-07-21T18:06:18.639-04:00I recommend the work of the Canadian/American soci...I recommend the work of the Canadian/American social psychologist Bob Altemeyer, conveniently popularized in his own little book The Authoritarians (which you can download for free) and in John Dean’s Conservatives Without Conscience. Basically there are a lot of people who, in the US tend to be concentrated on the political right (though people with the same personality type might have different political leanings in different societies), with the following characteristics: <br /><br />1) a high degree of submission to these established leaders in their societies, <br />2) high levels of aggression in the name of those authorities<br />and <br />3) a high level of conventionalism. <br /><br />That’s on page 8 of Altemeyer’s book. But what is really interesting is what emerges later. Once they accept somebody as a leader, these authoritarian types are strongly inclined to give those leaders a free pass when they violate the conventions to which they are otherwise aggressively attached. Furthermore they have a strong tendency to compartmentalized thinking and to what Orwell called ‘doublethink’. They are unusually good at maintaining mutually inconsistent beliefs., and are relatively unworried by cognitive dissonance. Thus their ideologies are relatively immune to criticism or revision because they are highly tolerant of inconsistency. So once they have accepted Trump as their savior they will continue to approve even as he conspicuously violates the codes that they would otherwise zealously enforce. In particular they will be a lot less worried than consistency-freaks and truth-freaks (to adapt Feyerabend’s terminology) by Trump’s frequent lies and self-contradictions. It’s only if you are not very good at compartmentalizing your thinking that it bothers you if the President says X on Day I and not-X on Day 2. Trump supporters are not like that. Furthermore, although these right-wing authoritarians are precisely the kind of people who would be appalled by another President’s cozying up to Russia, if their guy does it automatically becomes OK. <br />Charles Pigdenhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01131765562671298571noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-54640197951007411242018-07-21T08:21:51.357-04:002018-07-21T08:21:51.357-04:00LFC,
But if the idea of meritocracy (in the mouth...LFC,<br /><br />But if the idea of meritocracy (in the mouths of the winners) implies self-congratulation, as you agree, then the losers, if they are normally intelligent, would tend to perceive that in the discourse of the winners who spout ideas of meritocracy. <br /><br />That is especially true in the case of TV pundits (which is the case here), who are communicating ideas. No subtle cultural cues are required for the losers to see the implications of the discourse about meritocracy.<br /><br />In fact, I would say that those who communicate with the public about current events in positions considered "successful" should out of basic intellectual honesty explain to their listeners their cultural background, that they always or almost always come from families where ideas are discussed, where books are read, where reading is encouraged, where their parents express themselves well and with a large vocabulary, etc. That is even more true today when economic and social inequality has become and, I'd wager, will increasingly become a subject for pressing public concern and when demagogues such as Trump play on the resentment produced by that inequality. <br /><br />Maybe the road to socialism begins with a bit of truthfulness from all of us. <br /><br /><br /><br />s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-75314422251887976992018-07-20T21:45:46.130-04:002018-07-20T21:45:46.130-04:00@s. wallerstein
yes, but the issue I'm raisin...@s. wallerstein<br /><br />yes, but the issue I'm raising is, assuming person X (a member of "the privileged minority") does indeed have the attitude that his/her success is wholly a result of 'merit' (and not of something more arbitrary), how does X convey that attitude to others? Wolff's post, if you re-read the passage in question, says that members of the privileged minority congratulate themselves <i>publicly</i> on having earned their rewards.<br /><br />That may be true in some cases. I was asking for more specifics, that's all, not doubting that in some cases successful (in an economic etc. sense) people do give off or exude a feeling of self-congratulation. (And others don't; it varies.)<br /><br />So to repeat, the issue is not whether the idea of a meritocracy implies self-congratulation but, to the extent that it does, how that implication gets put into operation "on the ground" such that the less successful are made to feel that they are viewed as inferior (or whatever). Some of that is conveyed through somewhat subtle cultural cues, some of it may be conveyed unconsciously. In any case I think it's a subject or a proposition that might deserve some further exploration rather than simply being asserted.LFCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-8645468654024562772018-07-20T16:26:51.775-04:002018-07-20T16:26:51.775-04:00LFC,
I don't watch TV either, but the whole...LFC,<br /><br />I don't watch TV either, but the whole idea of meritocracy, which is generally endorsed by those on top, implies a certain self-congratulation. <br /><br />Now I have known a few successful people, my father among them, who believed that society is as unjust and exploitative as Marx described it (although I doubt that he ever bothered to read Marx) and that if there were going to be winners and losers, he was going to among the winners, even if he had to punch below the belt from time to time. In fact, he once explicitly asked me why I preferred the wormeye's view of the golf course. <br /><br />As the Bible says, "I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor battle to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding nor favor to men of skill." <br /><br />Still, that point of view is, in my experience, very rare among the winners of this world who almost uniformly congratulate themselves on having won a fair race because of their superior merits, which generally they do not see as just traits (I was born with stronger legs than you), but as moral virtues.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />s. wallersteinhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17448905469871566228noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-6780184360622651462018-07-20T15:32:42.763-04:002018-07-20T15:32:42.763-04:00I don't watch TV, so how does Jake Tapper, to ...I don't watch TV, so how does Jake Tapper, to take one example, convey his message of self-congratulation? Is it a matter of subtext, of latent content (to appropriate your word), of body language, or what? Clearly Tapper cannot possibly come right out and say: "I deserve my position in the socioeconomic and prestige hierarchy while an unemployed resident of a small town in W Virginia has only himself to blame for his plight because of the choices he has made." J.D. Vance's <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> arguably does say something like that in certain sections, but on TV one cannot be so direct, even if -- for the sake of argument -- Jake Tapper does indeed have this self-congratulatory (in the specified sense) mentality. So my question is: How does he convey it? LFCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-13050047791850734672018-07-20T14:31:17.058-04:002018-07-20T14:31:17.058-04:00no, no! I mean Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough...no, no! I mean Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough and Jake Tapper and on and on.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-38190079722264742402018-07-20T14:10:54.019-04:002018-07-20T14:10:54.019-04:00Professor Wolff, you wrote "All those condemn...Professor Wolff, you wrote "All those condemning Trump on television . . . are . . . members of that privileged self-congratulatory minority." Did you, perhaps, mean those supporting Trump?Javiernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-46806426079660691482018-07-20T11:53:13.687-04:002018-07-20T11:53:13.687-04:00Marcel Proust [hem, hem] raises a very interesting...Marcel Proust [hem, hem] raises a very interesting question. There is a good deal of evidence from many experiments that expressed opinions on all manner of things can be markedly influenced by such apparently irrelevant factors as a previous question or some seemingly unrelated information. I don't know the answer, but it would be fascinating to put it to the test.Robert Paul Wolffhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11970360952872431856noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-73626703204822456302018-07-20T11:25:26.857-04:002018-07-20T11:25:26.857-04:00Suppose the polltakers began the series of questio...Suppose the polltakers began the series of questions on Obama/Trump by starting with the latent question before turning to the manifest question. How would this change the reliability of the poll overall? Would it be more likely then to get an accurate answer (i.e., what the respondent actually believes)?marcel proustnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687347459208158501.post-74210573572164758542018-07-20T10:52:38.553-04:002018-07-20T10:52:38.553-04:00I think all you say is obvious and common sense- t...I think all you say is obvious and common sense- though some of us need a refresher from time to timeHowiehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12474061778220524205noreply@blogger.com