The Bluestocking, vol 231

someone else is eating or opening a window

Happy Friday!

I’m writing this from the beautiful, windswept Suffolk coast, where I’ve come to write for a bit. Because this is Britain, one of the main notable features along the seafront is this inexplicable statue of a dog called Snooks:

(It purports to be a tribute to the town’s doctor during the war. Perhaps he was a dog.) Again, because this is Britain, a mystery local regularly knits new outfits for Dr Snooks. Here, for example, he’s wearing not just a scarf and hat but a backpack.

Helen

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James McAvoy in Split

Multiple Personality Disorder Probably Doesn’t Exist (Freddie deBoer, Substack)

The people who have traditionally been treated for [dissociative identity disorder] have suffered, greatly, and not in the cool arty time-to-dye-my-hair-again type of suffering common to social media performance, but actual, painful, pitiable suffering. Those patients who have been diagnosed in the past with the disorder, by doctors, and who have spent years and years dealing with the consequences, are often truly debilitated people, whether the disorder itself is real or not. They require intense therapy, are often medicated with powerful drugs, and are frequently subject to long-term hospitalization. They tend to live broken and pain-filled lives, like most people with serious mental illness.

Of the dozens of high-follower DID accounts that I’ve seen, almost none are experiencing any of that.

There’s a structural problem with social media vs the MSM which is that you can make any claim about yourself online and it’s unlikely to be subject to independent verification (in fact, asking for evidence is deemed a hostile act). There’s a sense that a diagnosis is private information—even when it is monetised, or used to “educate others” from a position of assumed expertise, or used to make political claims.

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Illustration by Brian Stauffer for Vanity Fair

The New American Right (Vanity Fair)

This New Right is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists. At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation. But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them.

This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a ‘dystopian hell-world.’

I hadn’t heard of Curtis Yarvin until I read this piece. Or rather, I hadn’t heard of Yarvin, but I had heard of his blogging pseudonym Mencius Moldbug. Yikes. It’s interesting to me that the New Right are sometimes funded by early Facebook investor and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, yet are nonetheless often deeply sceptical of Big Tech.

Peter Thiel with his PayPal co-founder Elon Musk

My main takeaway is that these people remind me of the bad Mitfords: politics is about being edgy and interesting more than anything else, “like Leni Riefenstahl–Edie Sedgwick”, as one woman describes it in this piece. They find strongmen leaders kind of . . . dangerous and sexy, much like Unity and Diana found Hitler’s absolute power thrilling and erotic. And like the Mitfords, some of these guys seem quite naive about what an authoritarian takeover actually means (spoiler alert: the life expectancy for senior lieutenants is often not-great). It will be the world’s bleakest joke if America falls into authoritarianism because some nerds wanted to look cool; as I’ve written before, modern political journalism has to wrestle with the fact that people can be simultaneously cringe, ironic, semi-self-aware and dangerous.

Inevitably, there has been some pushback on Vanity Fair running this piece, as if it amplifies and glorifies wannabe dictator hipsters. But I think it’s important to record what people are preaching. For example, here is JD Vance—as the author points out, “an intellectual himself, even if he’s not currently playing one on TV,” someone who has fairly thoroughly debased himself to get that coveted Trump endorsement—describing his vision for America. (This is a man running for the Senate as a Republican in Ohio, remember.)

“I think Trump is going to run again in 2024,” [Vance] said. “I think that what Trump should do, if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.”

“And when the courts stop you,” he went on, “stand before the country, and say—” he quoted Andrew Jackson, giving a challenge to the entire constitutional order—“the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”

This is a description, essentially, of a coup.

“We are in a late republican period,” Vance said later, evoking the common New Right view of America as Rome awaiting its Caesar. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

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European Royalty Corner: Thanks to Jonn for alerting me to the existence of Heinrich the 45th, the scion of a German aristocratic family where every single boy was called Heinrich and so they had to be numbered too. When they got to 100 they started again.

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Quick Links

1. Anton Howes on why innovation prizes fail. Also another evidence point for my developing theory that almost all popular narratives about scientific discovery are basically lies (Works in Progress).

2. Charlie Warzel also doesn’t know what Elon Musk actually wants out of Twitter, but he worries that it’s a return to 2016 (The Atlantic).

3. “Stewart’s specific genius on The Daily Show was layering facts and complexity into jokes, and stitching punch lines together into George Carlin–esque political riffs. When Stewart was at the peak of his powers, no one could pack more ideas into 22 minutes of comedy. But something has turned. Now he’s the one who seems overwhelmed by complexity and prone to oversimplification.” What happened to Jon Stewart? I used to love The Daily Show, so I was quite disappointed when I watched a clip from The Problem With Jon Stewart, which came off as sneering. I presumed that I had changed. But apparently lots of other people feel the same (The Atlantic).

4. Steven Johnson on how AI can now get jokes, effortlessly placing it above the people in my Twitter replies over the last decade (Adjacent Possible, Substack)

5. “Five years ago, I had to raise my hand to go use the bathroom,” he tells me. “This is the tip of the iceberg. Give me 20 years and then see what we will accomplish.”’ A profile of 23-year-old YouTube creator MrBeast, whose big thing is giving loads of money away (Rolling Stone).

6. “On his left, Antoine takes up the tale. ‘The thing is, the political class don’t listen to people like us. People call us extremists, but we just want someone who will make sure that the lights stay on and not do something stupid, like take us out of the European union. Beyond that—’, he shrugs, ‘I am relatively happy. This is a great time to be alive, isn’t it? I still have all my teeth. There is no war.’” Macron’s resounding victory gives me a chance to repost this deeply reported 2017 dispatch I filed from Deep in Macron Country (New Statesman).

7. The Navalny documentary is on the BBC iPlayer. It’s a portrait of extraordinary bravery —the scene where he returns to Russia with his wife, knowing what a risk that is, is both riveting and tough to watch— and, like Volodymyr Zelensky, he has incredible charisma, a sense of humour and a Gen Z-level understanding of social media. I hope he makes it out of prison alive.

8. I also watched the documentary Final Account, interviewing the last surviving Germans who participated in the Third Reich. It’s deliberately low-key and non-aggressive in its interviewing style, and that creates an incredible portrait of denial, complicity and everyday cowardice among these 80-somethings who joined the SS, sure, but somehow didn’t see anything bad happen to Jews or they would have said something. One of the recurring motifs is an old person’s face lighting up as they remember something from their youth — camaderie, their parents’ pride, their high test marks. Eerie. (BBC)

9. That reminds me: I’ve been meaning to link to this NYT interactive on Auden’s Musee des Beaux Arts, written on the eve of WWII.

   About suffering they were never wrong,

   The old Masters: how well they understood

   Its human position: how it takes place 

   While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

   I love this poem, and I think it explains why the internet drives so many people mad—it’s a reminder that you are not, in fact, The Main Character, and that while you’re in terrible emotional pain, other people are having a sandwich.

Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus

See you next time!