Lori Gottlieb and the Collapse of the American Empire

The message we send kids with all the choices we give them is that they are entitled to a perfect life—that, as Dan Kindlon, the psychologist from Harvard, puts it, “if they ever feel a twinge of non-euphoria, there should be another option.” Mogel puts it even more bluntly: what parents are creating with all this choice are anxious and entitled kids whom she describes as “handicapped royalty.” _Lori Gottlieb

Pity meek and mild Lori Gottlieb, an intern in family counseling who has made some interesting observations in the course of her work. Gottlieb discussed her observations in a recent piece in the Atlantic. The piece has raised a firestorm of online debate, snark, and condemnation, almost entirely undeserved. The fault in Gottlieb's piece lies not in what she says, but in what she leaves out -- what these disturbing findings imply for the future of the American empire.

...Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

...Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

“It’s like the way our body’s immune system develops,” he explained. “You have to be exposed to pathogens, or your body won’t know how to respond to an attack. Kids also need exposure to discomfort, failure, and struggle...

...Wendy Mogel is a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles who, after the publication of her book The Blessing of a Skinned Knee a decade ago, became an adviser to schools all over the country. When I talked to her this spring, she said that over the past few years, college deans have reported receiving growing numbers of incoming freshmen they’ve dubbed “teacups” because they’re so fragile that they break down anytime things don’t go their way. “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them their entire childhoods,” Mogel said of these kids, “so they don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”

...A few months ago, I called up Jean Twenge, a co-author of The Narcissism Epidemic and professor of psychology at San Diego State University, who has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem. She told me she wasn’t surprised that some of my patients reported having very happy childhoods but felt dissatisfied and lost as adults. When ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great job!” not just the first time a young child puts on his shoes but every single morning he does this, the child learns to feel that everything he does is special. Likewise, if the kid participates in activities where he gets stickers for “good tries,” he never gets negative feedback on his performance.

...This same teacher—who asked not to be identified, for fear of losing her job—says she sees many parents who think they’re setting limits, when actually, they’re just being wishy-washy. “A kid will say, ‘Can we get ice cream on the way home?’ And the parent will say, ‘No, it’s not our day. Ice-cream day is Friday.’ Then the child will push and negotiate, and the parent, who probably thinks negotiating is ‘honoring her child’s opinion,’ will say, ‘Fine, we’ll get ice cream today, but don’t ask me tomorrow, because the answer is no!’” The teacher laughed. “Every year, parents come to me and say, ‘Why won’t my child listen to me? Why won’t she take no for an answer?’ And I say, ‘Your child won’t take no for an answer, because the answer is never no!’”

... _theAtlantic

And so on... An interesting glimpse into the modern state of child-raising in the US from someone on the front lines of family therapy.

If Americans truly are raising generations of fragile, entitled children, who is going to do the hard work that needs to be done? As long as the US economy was doing well, America could import its hard workers and many of its hard thinkers, so as to keep the wheels of commerce and invention moving along. But with the rapid emergence of crisis levels of debt and demography, the US economy may not be able to import so much of its needed human capital -- to compensate for the disastrous failures of its parents and educational system.

Children need to learn practical competence in a wide range of skills. They need to learn to focus on a difficult task, and learn to work hard at it until it is done. Children must not be age-segregated in prison schools for so many of their formative years, kept away from any responsibility or opportunity to explore the real world.

The Roman Empire collapsed over a few centuries for many of the reasons the American empire is threatened: debt, demography, social problems that were swept under the rug, entitled and abusive ruling classes, etc.

American parents have only one or two children, on average, and far too many of them are being raised as "trophy children," pampered perpetually childish pets rather than skilled, competent, and responsible proto-adults. This failure to reproduce -- and failure to competently raise the meagre progeny which they do produce -- is what truly threatens the collapse of the American Experiment (not actually an empire in the Roman sense at all).

Gottlieb was actually rather tentative and modest in her conclusions -- not taking them as far as she perhaps should have. Yet she was widely castigated by the "pampering nannies" of modern academia, journalism, and the blogosphere. The dysfunction can probably not be reversed before catastrophe ensues, at least not in the many strongholds of the destructive philosophy.

It is up to parents who wish to raise competent and functional children to structure an environment around the child which facilitates the acquisition of skills and an ongoing successful adaptation to adult world responsibilities.

Previously published at Al Fin, The Next Level

Abandoning Western Civilisation: Views of an Evolving Professor

Professor Bruce Charlton is a complex person. Having first trained in medicine and psychiatry, over the years, Charlton has lectured on Theoretical Medicine, Evolutionary Psychiatry, Psychology, Epidemiology, Anatomy, and Physiological Sciences. Charlton has published a large number of articles, several books, has championed some original ideas in the area of "psychological neoteny", and most recently has been involved in controversy as editor of "Medical Hypotheses", a speculative medical journal.

One recent article in Charlton's blog, Bruce Charlton's Miscellany, caught my eye: Should Western Civilization be Saved? In the article, Charlton expresses the view that since western civilisation contains the seeds to its own destruction, it can probably not be saved regardless of what is done.

Since much of the Al Fin enterprise is devoted to saving just enough of western civilisation to jump-start "the next level," Charlton's warnings of the impending demise of the west are not taken lightly in the planning offices of the Al Fin Consolidated Syndicates.

Charlton is not the first thinker to declare that the west is doomed. And he will not be the last. But he is a thinker and blogger of considerable depth, and his ideas should be taken seriously.

The self-destroying aspects of the West have always been there, and they permeate or are woven-into the whole.

Western Civilization has always been changing - not merely superficially, but deeply. It has never been stable - not even for two generations in a row.

The West is continually becoming more abstract, more specialized, less Christian.

There is no evidence that The West ever could be stable - and everything suggests the opposite. _BCM

Notice the reference to Christianity. Such thoughts will prove important to understanding his meanings. Charlton was once an atheist, and his change of heart to religious belief casts his ideas under a fascinating lighting scheme. All the same it is best to take a person's words at "face value" (as you interpret the term), and shade the meanings appropriately as you learn more.

The West is perpetually in transition: it has no essence: it is evolutionary.

Those who set out their stall on defending 'Western Civilization' are therefore either defending a process (markets, democracy, 'the Open Society'), and an evolutionary process which might lead anywhere, including to self-destruction of Western Civilization (as, in my opinion, it already has)....

Or else they are really defending some other bottom line entity that is not Western Civilization and would quite likely dispense with Western Civilization at some point in the future: e.g. a nation or group of nations, a race, a ruling lineage (e.g. of monarchs, or castes)... the preservation of which might well necessitate at some point dispensing with what are currently 'Western values'.

In other words, if you favour a process (like democracy, sexual freedom) you must be prepared to sacrifice an entity (like a nation or a race): if you favour an entity you must be prepared to dispense with processes.

So, I am saying that it is strictly nonsense - and destructive nonsense - to claim to be defending Western Civilization.

...The West cannot be saved.

There is nothing to save; and anyway The West has self-destruction built-in, woven-in, pervasive.

How can you save something which so much wants to kill itself?

Take your eye off Western Civilization for just a moment and it will be swinging from the rafters with its own belt around its neck... _BCM

The suicidal references, coming from a psychiatrist who has himself suffered considerable recent tumult, are no doubt very meaningful.

The west is certainly full of contradictions and mutually destructive movements of variable and cyclic vitality. But is it true that "there is no there, there?" Certainly the west can be quite difficult to define and pin down in a comprehensive way. Is the modern west, for example, similar enough to the civilisations of ancient Greece, Rome, and middle ages Christianity, to consider it the same civilisation that is a bit futher along in evolutionary time? Perhaps, perhaps not.

Can you not ask the same questions about any particular human mind? We are full of contradictions, and we all carry the seeds of our own destruction. Each living human is evolving in both constructive and destructive ways.

Civilisations can survive the deaths of any number of its members, of course, so the evolutionary stream of a civilisation is much more interesting to observe.

It is true that a civilisation can destroy itself, or evolve "away from itself." But there are particular essences within a civilisation which can be worth saving, even if such essences are capable of creating instabilities within the system. If you try to remove all sources of instability from a civilisational system, you are left with a stagnant system which will choke on its own offal. At that point, competing civilisations will take over the territory, or a new civilisation will rise from the grave of the old.

The urge for stability can be taken too far, with fatal results for dynamic systems of all kinds -- from human brains to civilisations.

It is absolutely crucial that humans who are capable of doing so should learn to think "one level up" from Charlton's fascinating discussion. I am certain that Charlton is capable of such meta-thought. But many people who choose an orthodox ideology later in life (or at any time in life) can be resistant to lines of thought which may compel change.

Suffice it to say that Al Fin Futurologists conceive of a next level civilisation which owes a great deal to modern western civilisation -- particularly to western thought, from the European renaissance through the writing of the US Constitution.

Given the significant changes in the human substrate of the next level, the resulting civilisation will "feel" different, and will derive much of its stability from the underlying agreed-upon principles of outlook. But the next level as conceived by the Al Fin Syndicates contains far more dynamism than conventional western thinkers can typically imagine.

You must have that tension between stability and dynamism.

More from Charlton's blog later.


More: This short essay by French Philosopher Andre Glucksmann should be read alongside the short article by Charlton. By looking at "the original birth of freedom" in Athens, it is perhaps possible to see more clearly some of the strengths and weaknesses of western civilisation. Glucksmann admits the instability inherent in freedom, but accepts the risk:

Athens did not perfectly succeed, and it eventually collapsed—just as our own democracies may someday collapse. I do not believe in the eternity of systems, even our own. Those founded on the attempted negation of chaos and the suppression of freedom will, I hope, collapse sooner. But those founded on freedom may be destroyed by the imbalance inherent in their constitutions, an imbalance that animates and sometimes consumes them. _CityJournal

How Much Crap Will Americans Take from Their Governments?

Before the US could become an independent country, it had to fight a bloody revolution in order to force Britain to release its claim on the colonies. The US experienced its ups and downs, over the centuries, but other than a brief civil war its people have remained relatively loyal to the crown government. But things do tend to change over time, and we may soon see just how far royalty-imitating US governments can push their subjects before the people decide to rebel.

Many members of the ruling classes suffer under the delusion that "The Tea Party Movement" is as bad as rebellions in the US are likely to get. Consequently these pseudo-intellectual twits tend to direct their most concentrated bile against people such as Sarah Palin or Sharron Angle. These complacent fools have a lot to learn, and a long way to fall.

The US federal government is spending its way into oblivion -- but the US government can have new money printed to make up its deficits. US states, cities, and counties, are likewise spending themselves into perdition, but they cannot print their own money. Consequently, they must issue bonds and otherwise borrow money to operate. But as these local governments continue to spend beyond their means, eventually even bond investors begin to wise up. Their bonds lose value, and such governments must pay more to borrow more.

When governments reach the end of their ability to borrow, they will be forced to cut services and other obligations. But even cutting services and all obligations except for public sector union contracts will not save the cities, states, and counties. These profligate spenders are going to have to do the unthinkable -- declare bankruptcy and slash their union contracts to the bare bones.

Even that will not be enough. They will have to go back on their word to workers and retirees, and in many cases dump public sector union contracts altogether -- and make public sector unions illegal for many occupations such as police and fire.

The unions will not sit still for this, in fact they will become even more violent than we are accustomed to seeing them become. In addition, when police and fire departments go on strike, let the public beware. Many cities, counties, and states have already begun cutting back on essential services, so when law enforcement and fire departments go on strike, a lot of people may not notice very much difference.

The Pew Center on the States estimates $1 trillion of underfunding for the pensions and health benefits of states.

Economists Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Rochester and Joshua Rauh of Northwestern University have higher totals for pensions alone; their gaps are about $3 trillion for states and almost $600 billion for localities.

Underfunded health benefits for states and localities together are reckoned by different studies between $500 billion and $1.5 trillion, report economists Robert Clark and Melinda Morrill of North Carolina State University.

Whatever the ultimate costs, they threaten future levels of public services. The generous benefits encourage workers to retire in their late 50s or early 60s after 25 years of service. The health benefits typically provide coverage until retirees qualify for Medicare at 65.

To pay for unfunded benefits, either government services must be cut or taxes must be raised. _Samuelson

Here is the public union problem in a nutshell: Union members lobby vociferously for untenable wages and benefit packages. Greedy politicians willing to accept bribes to get reelected, go along. On any threat of reduction in benefits, union organizers get out the vote with massive fear-mongering campaigns promising ruin if they do not get what they want. At election time unions donate massively to candidates willing to back union sponsored agenda. Over time, school boards, city halls, and legislative bodies in general get packed with politicians accepting bribes (campaign contributions) from the unions. _Mish

Like homeowners, states and cities splurged on debt and found inventive ways to get around borrowing limits to finance projects they couldn’t pay for otherwise. And recently the federal government encouraged investors to pour their money into the coffers of these less-than-creditworthy borrowers.

Now some of those investors, like the few lonely mortgage-industry short sellers in 2005–06, have started betting against the borrowers. Time reports that some of them “are jumping into the credit default swap market to bet against cities, towns and states.” A CDS is an insurance contract that protects a bond holder against default. But there’s a difference: You don’t necessarily have to be exposed to the underlying bond to buy a CDS. They can be bought or sold, and are priced depending on the market’s perception of bond default probability. If the risk increases, it is likely that the demand for CDSs will too, leading to an increase in their price. Brian Fraser, a partner at the law firm Richards Kibbe & Orbe LLP, told Time, “The spreads on CDSs have been growing, and the dollar amount of CDSs on municipals has grown in the last year. That’s a clear warning sign that people are effectively starting to short the muni market.”

The state and municipal debt crisis could culminate in a request for the third near-trillion-dollar bailout of the last two years. That much federal borrowing on top of the current debt could very quickly have an impact on interest rates and on the dollar. And at that point, we can just forget about the recovery. _ReasonMag

The last quote above suggests that once the repercussions from state and municipal defaults and overspending percolate through the federal government bailout process, we can forget about any economic recovery.

But that is just the author's optimism speaking. In reality what you can forget about is any kind of domestic harmony between government worker and taxpaying citizen.

What should you expect, ultimately? When all of the money-grubbing corruption at the state, municipal, and federal levels impacts the total economy and sinks through the thick skulls of the average citizen, producer, employer, and investor, there will be more anger and hostility within the citizenry than can be contained by traditional and legal means.

Anticipating this, the federal government and many states have tried for several decades to strip US citizens of their US Constitutional Bill of Rights 2nd Amendment right to own firearms equivalent to weapons used by average soldiers in the national infantry. Since most Americans do not own or practise with firearms regularly, the reaction against such rights-limiting moves have been only sporadic and limited. But some people have been paying attention.

Americans tend to think in narratives -- stories -- so the stories that are passed from parents to children and from peer to peer are significant, in terms of how Americans will act in the public sphere. The more oppressive and "lordly" governments and government employees tend to act toward ordinary citizens, the more often stories such as "Unintended Consequences", "Let Us Prey," and the long list of similar narratives will be passed from person to person.

Such ideas will not likely captivate the majority of Americans' minds, but compared to the number of Americans who sit at the controls of the corrupt governmental enterprises, the number of persons who become indignant at the growing tyrrany of the ruling classes is likely to be significant.

The problems of debt and corruption are not unique to American states, municipalities, or federal governments. Governments in Europe are facing the same problems -- with the added problem of a growing underclass of third world Muslims who are apt to generate bloody uprisings of their own.

The bond markets do not look good in the intermediate term, as all of this excrement contacts the rotating fan blades. The economic picture in general does not look good, which means that demand for economic goods such as commodities -- other than food -- does not look good.

How all of that will play out on the international stage -- who will be tempted to launch a war against whom, and so on -- must be left to your imaginations.

In the opinions of Al Fin economists and sociologists, it is public sector unions and their political partners in the US and other nations in the west who will bear a huge amount of blame for the economic brittleness and lack of flexibility which may ultimately (over decades) lead to governmental collapses across Europe and the Anglosphere. These public sector unions artificially inflate the sizes of governmental agencies to enhance their own power and income -- and prevent all governments and their agencies from downsizing during the inevitable, cyclic economic downturns which occur in any economic system.

As the next economic downturn develops long before we recover from the current one, the underlying dysfunctionality of politically correct, non-assimilated multiculturalism will manifest themselves in a very unpleasant manner.

You must know that those who are forewarned will more likely ride out the storm to reach the other side safely.

Evolution of Civilisations: Prelude to Collapse

19th Century American artist Thomas Cole's 5-part series of paintings, The Course of Empire, beautifully portrays the evolutionary rise and fall of an arbitrary civilisation in history. The theme of civilisational rise and fall has been replayed so many times that it has become a cliche -- and yet each civilisation believes itself immune to the universal mechanisms which guided the ascent and descent of its predecessors.

Perhaps the best known scholarly look at this phenomenon is Caroll Quigley's The Evolution of Civilizations. Quigley's treatment is a masterpiece of penetration, worth the time of any student of history. Such a book is more properly described as "meta-history", since it carefully examines the mechanisms behind repetitive and cyclical historical processes.

Earlier this year, John Robb took a look at Quigley's Evolution of Civilizations (TEOC), in an attempt to fit some of Quigley's ideas into his own program to modify society to create more resilient communities and societies. Robb made some unexpected discoveries in his study of Quigley, as is likely to happen to most thinkers who had not been exposed to "TEOC" before.

Many modern historians and thinkers are contemplating whether our civilisation has reached the end-game stage. Among them is Niall Ferguson, who suggested earlier this year that the collapse of the US hegemony may occur quite suddenly and unexpectedly as a result of uncontrollable complexities inherent in the modern system.

Great powers and empires are, I would suggest, complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized, which means their construction more resembles a termite hill than an Egyptian pyramid. They operate somewhere between order and disorder -- on "the edge of chaos," in the phrase of the computer scientist Christopher Langton. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis -- a single grain of sand causes a whole pile to collapse, or a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon and brings about a hurricane in southeastern England. _Ferguson_February 26, 2010 "Foreign Affairs" - March/April 2010 Edition

Thomas Cole paintings courtesy of Wikipedia

The short lifespan of humans -- a matter of mere decades -- combined with a relatively low average intelligence, leads to inevitable instabilities and tendencies to the dissolution of polities over time. This is due to the way that power is actually seized, controlled, and administered at various levels of complex societies, in a short-lived, semi-intelligent species of barely advanced apes.

The type of disorder within Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti, Iraq, Pakistan -- or any number of third world states -- that one may have observed from afar, can easily visit your home town without so much as a by-your-leave. Violent dissolution needs no excuse to intrude in a highly complex civilisation. It only needs a few tumblers to fall in the proper places, to merely get its foot in the door.

If the Power Grid Were to Die Tomorrow

The trailer above is from the film "One Hundred Mornings." It follows two couples hunkered down by a lake in Ireland, while society is falling apart around them -- and supplies are running out.

What would you do if the electric grid went dead tomorrow? If grocery stores shut down because trucks no longer had gas to make food deliveries? Self-sufficiency and food security are popular topics...

...And now, a film called "One Hundred Mornings" takes a look at the kind of life we might have in a post-petroleum scenario, when society breaks down and people have to quickly learn to fend for themselves.

This film isn’t a doom-and-gloom documentary like "Crude Impact", nor an overly dramatized action thriller like "The Day After Tomorrow". Instead, "One Hundred Mornings" focuses on two couples hiding out at a lakeside cabin in Ireland, 10 weeks after all the lights have gone out. In addition to the stress of dwindling supplies and social unrest enter both a self-sufficient hippie neighbor and suspicions of infidelity!

The first screenings will happen in Los Angeles at the Downtown Independent Theatre starting Sept. 16, after which the film will travel to Northern California for the San Francisco Irish Film Festival, happening Sept. 23-25. _mnn

If anyone were to film an accurate portrayal of what were to happen during a long-term collapse of the power grid and fuel supplies, they would not be allowed to show it in theatres. A graphic, realistic portrayal of how quickly civilised human society can degenerate into a lawless battleground of immediate appetites and primal fears, would not appeal to anyone except the morbid -- who enjoy watching the "death films," where people actually die.

The film discussed above deals with a society crashing when petroleum supplies run short, but there are dozens of ways that the power grid could be brought to its knees for a prolonged period of time. Very few communities are prepared for such an event. Individual families and groups of families could survive in the midst of such unprepared communities, but they would need to keep a low profile, and turn a blind eye to what their neighbors were enduring. How many can do that? Much easier if you can find a remote cabin, far away from the breakdown of polite society, and wait for things to settle out.

If you are a physician, a fireman, a policeman, an EMS worker, etc., could you do that? Could you turn your back and walk away, if your family were at risk?

As Nations Collapse, City-States Provide Centers of Stability

The 21st century will not be dominated by America or China, Brazil or India, but by the city. In an age that appears increasingly unmanageable, cities rather than states are becoming the islands of governance on which the future world order will be built. This new world is not -- and will not be -- one global village, so much as a network of different ones. _FP

As national governments grow larger and more unwieldy, corruption and dysfunction become the new normal. Huge, clumsy new government agencies prove easier to form than to dismantle. Unionised government workers and power-hungry bureaucratic king-pins refuse to relinquish power or benefits, until huge national governments become the harsh taskmasters of an increasingly dissatisfied populace. The situation grows more unstable until it can no longer sustain itself. At that point, regional islands of stability form focal points for new organisation.

...we have to look back nearly a thousand years, to the medieval age in which cities such as Cairo and Hangzhou were the centers of global gravity, expanding their influence confidently outward in a borderless world. When Marco Polo set forth from Venice along the emergent Silk Road, he extolled the virtues not of empires, but of the cities that made them great. He admired the vineyards of Kashgar and the material abundance of Xi'an, and even foretold -- correctly -- that no one would believe his account of Chengdu's merchant wealth. It's worth remembering that only in Europe were the Middle Ages dark -- they were the apogee of Arab, Muslim, and Chinese glory. _FP

Accelerating this shift toward new regional centers of gravity are port cities and entrepôts such as Dubai, the Venices of the 21st century: "free zones" where products are efficiently re-exported without the hassles of government red tape. Dubai's recent real-estate overreach notwithstanding, emerging city-states along the Persian Gulf are investing at breakneck speed in efficient downtown business districts, offering fast service and tax incentives to relocate. _FP

...the advent of global hubs and megacities forces us to rethink whether state sovereignty or economic might is the new prerequisite for participating in global diplomacy. The answer is of course both, but while sovereignty is eroding and shifting, cities are now competing for global influence alongside states. _FP

The author of the FP piece linked above envisions the rise of the city alongside the continuing power of the nation-state. But conventional contemporary thinkers too often lack the historical perspective which allows the concept of the "rise and fall" of nations to become a tangible reality inside themselves and in their writings.

A large number of nations in Africa and Asia are teetering on the brink of Yugoslavia-style dissolution. Whether illogically slapped-together by imperial conquerors without regard to tribe, language, culture, or religion -- or simply having outgrown whatever bounds held them together up intil now -- these booby-trap nations sit waiting for the right trigger to explode and dissolve in smoke and flames.

Larger nations which are intimately involved with these "booby-trap" nations stand to be hurt badly when the IED-nations explode. A chain reaction of exploding and collapsing states could easily result -- particularly when dysfunctional governments intentionally place their nations in extreme risk via unwise policies of debt and demography.

Things fall apart, yes. But they also put themselves together, afterward. Consider how the pieces may choose to re-organise.