People Suck

The Fundamental Flaw of the Progressive Worldview

We all recognize on some level that people suck. The idea that structural factors are weightier causes on outcomes than personal beliefs and behaviors is simply not true. Poor people are poor mostly because of how they act (how they work and spend). Prisoners are mostly in jail because of the decisions they make. Fat people are mostly fat because of their habits. This isn’t a harsh claim-it’s actually liberatory. The important thing to note is that it’s true, though, and pretending that it’s not (in order to shield people from ‘blame’ or ‘stigma’) does no good to anyone. I’ve seen this reality in my personal life a thousand times. It’s time to imprint it upon the culture.

People suck. People are mean, short-sighted, cruel, lazy and greedy. People eat themselves into immobility, waste their lives on pornography, cheat on their spouses and backstab their friends. This isn’t about crime or sin, either. Many people who strenuously follow the law don’t do it out of some moral principle-they’re too frightened to step outside the lines. There are millions of people who avoid illegality and infidelity and malignant deceit, yet who are still gossipy and slothful and dull and disgusting. There are conscientious people that are weak and anxious. There are brave people that are lazy and duplicitous.

Why does fast food and why do sports betting apps (all smart phone apps!) and why does advertising and Ozempic (a medication that primarily only suppresses the appetite, making it easier for lazy and physically repulsive and insecure people to do what they could be doing anyway) sell so well? They’re wildly popular because millions of people are barely better than cattle. In many ways they’re worse. Cows aren’t vicious or two-faced or insecure (at least they don’t seem to be). There’s a huge mass of people that are a dull-eyed, predictable, anxious human herd too uninspired to even develop real addictions, or make any bold or original moves. Our entire system is propped up by the consumption of these kinds of addictive products, predicated on human weakness, plus a hundred more.

Look around, at the gas station or on a train or in a store: most of those people you see are uninspired, petty, selfish, and lazy. They might not especially be those things-but all that means is that they’re not outliers. Look inside yourself. Are you a careful thinker? Are you disciplined with your diet? Are you kind to others? Are you willing to take a stand for what’s right? Are you curious about the world and generous and unafraid? Are you stable and honest and temperate? Ultimately, few people are. The obesity you see, the single mothers, the nice clothes, the big houses, the rudeness, the raised voices, the slack faces staring into phones-these are all products of human weakness and imperfection. These flaws are, in many ways, the defining aspect of our species. They’re so pronounced and ubiquitous that almost no one is free of at least a few of them.

Even if her claim was true, it would barely be relevant. This individual has much bigger issues than ambient and difficult to detect levels of racism.

Most poor people are poor because they’re some combination of lazy, stupid, or profligate. Most prisoners are anti-social or have low impulse control-they do whatever they want in whichever moment without any thought to others or to the future (which is a trait nurtured by addiction and by mental illness. That is why these things are so wildly overrepresented in the prison population). Most bad students (which is the large majority, in the United States) are simply lazy and don’t care. They could’ve been taught to care given the correct values and cultural setting, but they weren’t because the adults in their lives are also lazy and unambitious. Many simply have low IQ’s, and there’s no realistic way to correct this that we know of. Lots of people are simply dullards and nothing can change that. None of this has anything to do with structural factors. On any given day any one of these (lazy) people could change their outlook and devote themselves to learning and achievement (and some do) but most never will, because they don’t want to dedicate the work and attention to those goals. They suck. They’ll never take hold of their fate, and they will wallow in mediocrity until bad driving or diabetes or cancer takes them.

We understand that everyone is flawed but consider that for a minute. Why is everyone flawed? What does that mean? It’s now fashionable to pretend that there are no right or wrong actions, no better or worse habits or outlooks, but that’s just shallow modern pretense. Of course, there are, and we all know basically which is which. Would you rather be courageous and shapely and brilliant… or the opposite? You know exactly which behaviors and traits are preferable because you yourself prefer them. The thing is that we’re all predisposed to doing the wrong thing (the mean thing, the lazy thing) in such blatant and habitual ways that they can be called character traits. Sitting here, if you can’t summon into your mind some tendencies and decisions and interactions that you regret, or that you’re deeply ashamed of, then you’re probably a narcissist-which is another bad character trait.

Social Justice Ideology (SJI) is many things: a Christian millenarian heresy, a make-work program for punters with liberal arts degrees, a made-up story about history, an exhibition of personality pathology, a consolation for the weak and spiteful and mediocre.

At its core, however, it is a flawed narrative about human nature. I’m convinced that most true believers don’t know any real poor people (at least not well) and that’s why they’re able to maintain such a lofty and ridiculous conceptualization of human nature. I will put it in terms that they understand: does privilege seem to make people better, morally? Do wealth or status or workplace protections or benefits seem to make the people you know harder working or more generous or more honest? Then why would redistributing privilege to the ‘marginalized’ (a category that the believers profoundly misunderstand) have any effect on their character? Poor people might have a tougher time in a capitalist society, but look at the rich people. They might have less stress in their lives and better organizational capabilities but are they brave? Are they tough? Are they compassionate? For the most part they are not. They’re simply smarter and more organized… so they avoid poverty. But even their wealth makes them soft and ridiculous-insecure and goofy and out of touch.

There’s a bagel place I go on Sunday mornings. It’s near my gym. It’s pricey, so I tend to re-use the same cup to get iced coffee (which is self-serve-that’s why I go). It’s popular with the Escalade- and Benz-driving gerontocracy: scowling white ladies with pinched faces and little old men in polo shirts and visors. These people have followed the rules of society and amassed wealth and developed careers and maintained houses. They are, by any measure, successful people. They’re also the softest, whiniest, feeblest people you will ever meet. It’s not their age-most were weak and entitled at 40, when men should be reaching the peak of their physical strength. Most of their women were gossipy and insecure at the same age (or at 30, or 20). Their prosperity weakened them and their comfortable distance from the street made them self-conscious around and fearful of poor people. They should be! Many of them are nice. Some have some backbone, and have lived interesting lives, but as a class they are pathetic specimens. Poor people suck because they’re impulsive and gluttonous and disorganized and foolish. Rich people suck because they’re soft and out of touch and fearful of losing what they have, which usually makes them grasping and cowardly in the context of work and relationships.

The prosperous and educated today often nurture self-aggrandizing illusions about the causes of poverty or homelessness or imprisonment. The illusions are only possible because our society is so wealthy and so stratified that the upper classes can avoid any intimate contact or real conversation with poor people about meaningful issues for decades. In most cases these conditions (poverty, homelessness, incarceration) are almost completely the natural and predictable results of an individual’s freely chosen behavior. Talk to the people affected. Ask about their lives. See for yourself.

Wouldn’t cheating on your wife and drinking every morning and wasting money on gambling and living in profound laziness or gluttony worsen your life and hurt your financial status? Wouldn’t cutting corners at work and wasting money on trivialities and spending your life on your couch make you a less valuable worker? Then isn’t it possible that there are many people who dedicate their lives to such things and that is why they’re poor or stressed or indebted? There’s not some mysterious structural handicap, which disappears when you dig into the data. There are structural factors, like immigration status and socioeconomic level and parental education, which are real and significant. However, none of them is more important than personal attitude, overall. Mostly the picture is just one of poor people developing patterns of behavior and teaching them to newer and younger poor people, who then get a similar result. Most poor people in the United States could easily lift themselves out of their station within a decade by changing their romantic tendencies and spending habits and personal ambitions. Most never will. They suck.

If you shot and killed someone you might end up in jail. So, perhaps many of the murderers in our jails are just people who decided to shoot and kill people… and their identity category or social disadvantage isn’t that relevant (other than as cultural contexts which taught them certain reactions and behaviors). It could be the fact that decisions have consequences, and that people have a great deal of choice and control over their habits and decisions. It could be the fact that the depressing tendency toward weakness and vengeance and cowardice is the primary cause of so much poverty and disadvantage today-misogyny or income inequality or racism might have almost nothing to do with it.

The cultural direction we’ve been travelling is towards validation and affirmation of a person’s subjective feelings or identity, even when these are clearly ridiculous or maladaptive. If you find that a space isn’t welcoming for bigger bodies, make your body smaller. It’s absolutely possible… and it’s not even that difficult compared to many things. Millions upon millions of people will ruin their health and finances and relationships because they prefer the gustatory pleasure of junk food. People suck.

Social justice ideologues don’t like to ponder vices and vicious behavior among “the marginalized”. You will recognize an immediate reflex: any mention of cruelties or lies or maladaptive idleness among Palestinians or black Americans or immigrants or trans folks or women is deflected. Either the misstep is hand-waved, or it’s blamed on systemic factors. I think this is due less to a logical view of human psychology, and more of a burning desire to focus on the things that the believers care about (i.e., radical egalitarianism and promotion of victim groups). Unfortunately, this ignores the vast majority of human behaviors. Perhaps black Americans are marginalized. Perhaps more social status and wealth would help them, and also American society. But it wouldn’t change the fact that black people are often gluttonous and stupid and cruel. We know that it wouldn’t change things because millions of black American already possess inordinate levels of wealth and status, and they’re just as flawed as other people.

Rich people might have been unusually lucky in terms of their home conditions and intellectual endowments and social networks. Rich people tend to be weak and blameworthy and impulsive people who were taught to be more organized and ambitious (and accountable). Poor people are just weak and blameworthy and impulsive people who were not.

Black women and white women neglect their kids for days at a time. Black women and white women shake their babies and steal from stores and spend thousands on hair appointments and clothing rather than buying their kids food or medicine. Black women and white women make terrible and reckless sexual decisions that ripple down through the generations. They gossip and they manipulate. They’re cruel and petty. While there are disparities between groups across these behaviors (no groups are perfectly equivalent, in any metric) perhaps the fact that these behaviors aren’t particularly tied to race (they’re much more correlated with poverty, and impulsivity, and low IQ) mean that race isn’t a particularly salient variable here. If racism is causing these behaviors (or causing the things that are causing them) why is race such a poor predictor of them? It seems to be the case that life decisions and tendencies and values are much more important than race (or any other identity marker).

Obviously, this reality erodes the moral certainty of SJI believers. If women tend to be jealous and grasping and ambitious and amoral (even absent patriarchy) then empowering them will, in many cases, make things worse. How often have you seen the media breathlessly report a woman’s SA allegations, and how disappointed do they seem when they are revealed to be lies? Google the issue and you will see, again and again, the statistic that “2-10% of sexual assault allegations are false.” Not necessarily. 2-10% are proven to be false, by a system which is often not particularly willing to grill or investigate accuse or punish accusers when they lie. Remember the coverage around the Johnny Depp trial? The truth is that no one knows how many allegations are false, but we know that these kinds of deceptions are regularly perpetrated. Men are foolish and dishonest and gross and tend toward sexual recklessness and sometimes violence. Women are status-hungry, and often dishonest. They’re rewarded by society for belonging to the category of ‘victim’. People suck.

Status

People suck, and people care deeply about status. We’re not evolved to care much about wealth (although we care about safety and comfort, and these are often the same things) but we are evolved to care about status. This is characteristic of our social dynamics, which are animal realities that predate culture. You can blame the particulars of status and hierarchy on culture but their existence is biological, and always has been.

Humans have the most complex and extensive social networks of any creature on Earth, by far, and loss of status in the group is, in the hunter gatherer context, akin to death. We’re status-driven machines, evolved to decode the feelings of our fellows and the meanings of their words in a thousand different ways (most of them subconscious).

How funny is it, then, that status is rarely spoken of or acknowledged? Research indicates that educated folks care much more about status than low-status people… but have you ever heard anyone even acknowledge this? Does anyone account for their own status games or acknowledge those of others? Status is the great unspoken variable in human society, and its omission leads us to lie to each other and to ourselves.

Here’s one example: women compete with each other much differently (on average) than men do. They’re more prone to social aggression and forming mutable coalitions, and they tend toward gossip and borderline behaviors (passive aggression, emotional reactivity, histrionics) more than men (who are more prone to narcissism and physical aggression than women). Women often use their sexualities to gain wealth and power and in some cases they lie about men in order to leverage the greater amount of concern that society tends to have for them. On some level we all know this… but how often are these facts recognized? We went through a brief period in this country during which it was extremely risky to even mention this reality, even in the most general terms. What do you think might be the reaction if you mentioned this (universally understood) fact during HR trainings, or to a female colleague? Status is the great unspoken variable in human society, and its omission leads us to lie to each other and to ourselves.

We all pretend that accusers are traumatized and that the people crying on TikTok are victims and that the people complaining about discrimination or unfairness are deprived. Couldn’t it be that most people are just making things up (confabulating, exaggerating, intentionally misinterpreting) for sympathy and status? It’s certainly not inappropriate to wonder this but it is inappropriate to ask. In my experience, real victims rarely advertise their hurt for the world to see. I’m starting to believe that most of these malcontents (leveraging their stories on YouTube or television or X or in college classrooms or at rallies) aren’t victims at all.

Do I detect some glee here? People were wrongly accused and killed themselves. ‘Victims’ pretended to be more harmed than they were to soak up sympathy and status. Of course many real accusers were unearthed… but the possibility of punishing wrongdoers shouldn’t blind us to the status-seeking and dishonest quality of many people, especially educated and professional people. They’re often disingenuous and power-hungry. People suck.

Victim culture is all about status. By rewarding stories of hardship, or granting certain groups special cachet or selection bonuses, or incentivizing manipulative operators from certain groups to use allegations of offense or harm or bigotry, we have increased the status of people who claim to be victims. In many cases it’s a considerable increase, and so many people take advantage of it. We all know that certain people do this, we’ve all seen it, yet mentioning this fact or raising the possibility at relevant times is strictly forbidden. Questioning them is strictly forbidden, even when it’s out of curiosity or concern. We all pretend as if these people have suffered, when we all know (deep down) that they haven’t. We’re rewarded for pretending. We know this kind of thing has negative social effects and that it’s dishonest. Probably 99.9% of the time no one says anything. Everyone plays along and follows the script. Millions of people playing along with falsities and hypocrisies (including leaders and supervisors) is how we got to this place. But people are craven, and they worry about what others might think about them. People suck.

When racism is understood as a social malignancy which can characterize certain acts or beliefs or policies then it can be useful. As soon as it becomes a status reward, certain people will invoke it, even without any validity or evidence. The Leftist claim (which is ethically ridiculous) that “black people can’t be racist” is simply an effort to limit the status gains to certain groups. (I’ve written more and will write more about that elsewhere). As above, questioning the claimants or even asking them to describe the racism or their feelings is treated as a terrible affront. It’s a ridiculous charade, and on some level we all know it, and if you’ve played along with this kind of farce you should feel embarrassed. I would.

How much attention do reports of racial hate incidents on campus get, and how much less is there any discussion of they basically all seem to now be misunderstandings or hoaxes (usually perpetrated by the ‘victims’ themselves)? It certainly seems to be the case that black people are now more likely to make up stories of racism than to actually ‘suffer’ an incident, and (as with women) social incentives are fixed to exaggerate one’s pain and upset and ‘trauma.’ We can stigmatize and penalize people who say and display unacceptable ideas and symbols without pretending that this is really hurting anybody. We’re talking about a word (or a picture, or an object). It might be briefly upsetting but you have the support of the administration and the culture. You’re going to be okay. Stop whining and you’ll ironically deprive the malicious people (if they exist) of what they seek by demonstrating strength and resilience. The Civil Rights protesters of the 1950’s and ‘60’s (actual victims of racism) knew this. That’s a lesson that must be learned though, and it doesn’t occasion any status bonuses or delicious victim credits, so it’s completely ignored. People suck.

Of Course People Make Up Disabilities

When mental disorders are clinical labels to be used by healthcare providers to shape treatment they are limited and useful. As soon as they become status bonuses for people, certain group members will label themselves, or exaggerate their symptoms, or even make things up completely, in order to gain status. When we see people doing these things we can be sure that there’s a status reward there somewhere. If people could win automatic cash prizes for claiming racism or labelling themselves as victims of “C-PTSD” certain people surely would. Status is no different. Status is the great unspoken variable in human society, and its omission leads us to lie to each other and to ourselves.

Wealth and privilege

The believers in SJI have a very fixed and activist view of the world, and that view promotes certain causes as explanations for social problems. If these explanations were accurate or if the believers were amenable to contrary evidence, we wouldn’t find ourselves in such a pickle. Neither of those is the case: these beliefs are totally wrong and the believers are firmly ideologically captured. What if you believed that implicit racism and colonial mindsets were contributing to racial disparities between black and white K-12 students? If you gained control of the curriculum and changed it in the direction that you wished, then you would expect the disparities to shrink. More to the point: you would expect the black students’ performances to improve. That never happens. If you were a careful thinker who was honestly dealing with information as it came in such an outcome might lead you to amend your beliefs. If you’re beginning with ideological certainty then that way is closed to you. Instead you must pivot, and reframe the issue, and find ways to blame the things that you already oppose.

I’ve used black Americans (and their reference values relative to whites) as a persistent example here because the idea of racism (and ‘whiteness’) is so foundational to the SJI perspective in America (and oddly, considering the cultures and histories of Europe, abroad). In each country antiblack and antibrown racism are treated as major, crushing social problems solely on the basis of disparities (which are, as I said, complex and multivariate). When you include other groups, or investigate the breakdown of outcomes within these groups, the picture falls apart completely. Federal aid for rent and food will improve outcomes for poor people (the claim goes)… even though such benefits are lavishly given to Native American communities, and they have even worse problems. Asians surely can’t benefit from white supremacy… yet they outdo white America on most of the measures that matter. Nigerian immigrants are certainly black… yet they excel in terms of academics and generational wealth and business ownership. Irish and Jewish Americans are both white… yet their group metrics are wildly different, and these differences are consistent (and tied to other, nonracial factors). Clearly race isn’t the main variable here. In fact, no identity marker is (if you want to read a wholesale and systemic disassembly of the ‘disparity’ misapprehension you can’t do better than Thomas Sowell).

This ideology becomes even more ridiculous when you zoom out, though. It must focus on a narrow window of human activity, and emphasize the forces it despises (privilege, wealth, the moral doctrines of personal responsibility, whiteness) as operative causes. This can seem somewhat plausible when you’re comparing black and white groups of grade-schoolers, but it breaks down completely when you introduce new variables and expand your view. Try applying their analysis to other countries, or historical periods. Does wealth lead to better academic scores? Does privilege? Does whiteness? Not reliably. What does? Educated parents, stable families, IQ, work ethic. These are much better predicters of academic performance and so they must be admitted as operative factors. We can see these patterns again and again and again in country after country.

The awkward fact is that if we gave everyone plenty of wealth (somehow, without generating inflation) and good jobs and safe neighborhoods, we’d still have outbreaks of violence, and addiction, and theft, and social pathology. More to the point, we’d still have laziness and hypocrisy and cruelty. Those tendencies would create their own suffering, and that suffering would (very quickly) show itself as it does now: in poverty and imprisonment and broken homes. I suspect that the current distribution would slowly re-impose itself (flattened and changed somewhat). Meanwhile if we solved these social pathologies (somehow), most of the poverty and suffering would slowly dissipate. Poverty and inequality aren’t the causes of dysfunction. They’re the result. Race is barely a factor at all.

Mental Illness

Mental illness is regarded as a kind of culpability-eraser. Mental illness can certainly change the way people think and behave, and in many cases, it destroys what we understand to be rationality, and scrambles the human concepts of planning and incentives, but mentally ill people are not suffering angels. They’re merely people who have illnesses that change their faculties of perception and decision. They usually suck even more than average. They tend to be annoying, incapable, erratic, selfish. If you’ve spent time around them, you will agree with me.

Think of mental illness the way you do innate physical cowardice, or an unpleasant personality: it wasn’t chosen, and there’s nothing that can be done to eliminate it. There are things one can do to slightly ameliorate the burdens, but it’ll always be a factor and it’s simply something that you’ve got to live with. Physical cowards and unlikeable weirdos didn’t choose their flaws, either, but we still penalize them when they do thing we don’t like or which violate social norms. Mental illness is no different. It’s not some ‘special category’ of behavior just because it might involve a medical diagnosis. People choose almost nothing about themselves, yet we subject them to judgments and expectations and sanctions on the basis of all of these traits which are barely mutable.

There’s a tendency to treat mental illness as a blanket shield from responsibility. That runs into problems when the mentally ill do things that these people want to condemn, as the ongoing debacle with Kanye West illustrates. Freddie DeBoer wrote an excellent piece about this conundrum for the woke, as it relates to Ye:

He’s grown increasingly unstable, particularly on social media, prompting more and more criticism and performative exhaustion from the type of people who most directly shape American culture and media. They are, in particular, less and less likely to extend any accommodation to him based on the durable moral logic that someone operating at diminished capacity is someone whose culpability should at least be put into that context, should at least be understood to be complicated. They don’t want to hear about his mental illness as a potential influence on his ugly behavior.

This underlines how strange elite attitudes towards mental health and disability have become: the more or less explicit attitude of West’s many critics has been that, as he has become more and more unstable, they have grown less likely to allow for the possibility that his actions are influenced by mental illness and thus not entirely his fault. That’s weird!

Freddie explains that horrible downside of treating mental illness as an identity category:

…the progressive definition of disabilities has evolved from unfortunate hindrances that society must help to ameliorate with reasonable accommodation - a definition that was not broken, by the way - to all-defining, all-encompassing identity categories. And, as identity categories, disabilities cannot be perceived in a negative light; they must be seen as equally-valid ways of existing that are just different, not worse, for fear of contributing to “stigma.”…

…these people really hate Kanye, but they’ve been trained by their political tribe to see those with disabilities as perfect unblemished angels, beings of pure light, in common with progressive attitudes towards “marginalized peoples.” The only way to resolve these feelings is to deny that West’s behavior could possibly be the result of his disability. If identity liberalism insists that people with disabilities are to be treated as blameless, and you’re an identity liberal who very much wants to blame Kanye West, you must deny that he has a disability or that his disability could possibly be related to his behavior.

This is what has led to the sublimely witless claim “Mental illness doesn’t do that!” It’s become a commonplace on social media. 20-year-olds with absolutely no background in psychiatry confidently stare into their front-facing cameras and declare what mental illness can and can’t do. Mental illness can prompt people to cut out their own tongues, to light themselves on fire, to kill their children because they believe that CIA bugs are implanted in their brains, but it can’t prompt ordinary socially disreputable behavior or bigotry, apparently. It’s hard to believe, but very convenient for people who are desperately trying to keep various elements of their personality and politics stitched together without confronting the contradictions.

If you’ve been in a facility with very mentally unwell people for a significant amount of time, you’re likely to find the notion that people with mental illness would never engage in bigoted language totally bonkers, as that kind of thing is ubiquitous in those spaces. Do you have the slightest idea how many paranoid schizophrenics mutter about the Jews? Do you have the slightest idea how often you hear the n-word on a locked ward? This stuff is absolutely rampant, and the idea that it doesn’t exist is, again, a ploy by people who want to maintain their attachment to the idea that people from marginalized identities don’t do anything wrong. People suffering from paranoia and delusions borrow their fears and theories from the ambient culture, and there’s a lot of bigotry in the ambient culture.

DeBoer correctly labels the dynamic at play here: a relentless and religious need to define ‘good’ and ‘bad’ (pure and tainted, redeemed and malignant) attributes and groups and identities. Anyone who has any experience of mental illness knows that these categories simply don’t exist, at least not in reference their neat little rules.

The point is that there is no simplistic rubric you can apply for how to feel about mentally ill people, their disorders, or their behavior, including Kanye West, no matter what TikTok says. “Mental illness doesn’t do that” is embraced so lustily precisely because it appears to remove the burden of responsibility of judgment, takes away these sticky, unhappy, shaky decisions we make about how to treat people with mental illness. And in that it’s part and parcel of a broader world of identity liberalism which has relentlessly pursued an ethics of moral simplicity and universal ethical binarism, dividing the world into the utterly pure and good and blameless on one side and the forever unclean on the other. Madness is particularly poorly suited to this sort of thing, which is why so many liberals are so aggressive in insisting that “mental illness doesn’t do that.” They don’t want to experience the unmoored feeling of being unsure of how to judge someone.

Aside from deeper moral considerations, Kanye West is also very annoying to many people, and this too makes them uncomfortable. They’re too invested in the notion of mental illness as a kind of beautiful madness, as a cool and free-spirited way to live free from society’s conformity. In fact mentally ill people are very, very often deeply annoying. Trust me. Pathetic is another word that I’d use, to describe many people with psychiatric disorders. No romance to be found. A psychotic person is only sometimes dangerous, but they’re always annoying. Adjust your perceptions accordingly.

The only way we get out of this mess is by rejecting the idea that being mentally ill or having a disability generally is a form of identity category like being Black or a woman or gay; that idea has proven to be ruinous. We have to stop acting like diagnoses are items on an ala carte menu, to pick and choose for the purpose of farming attention and sympathy and to define the self. We have to do whatever we can to reject the notion that disabilities are lovable little quirks that define the self, rather than unfortunate hindrances that we should get rid of if we can or, if we can’t, ameliorate with appropriate policy. And we have to stop demanding that the world fit into our rigid binary beliefs in good and bad, in blameless victims and awful oppressors. The world’s more complicated than that, particularly regarding the broken mind.

Here's Your Kanye West Cliff Notes

Quite right. What’s broken here is a total concept of culpability. Anyone who’s part of an identity group is granted reprieve from culpability for almost anything: morbid obesity, child neglect, aggressive violence, lying about an innocent person raping you, etc. All are granted absolution under the banner of identity (grievance, victimhood, etc.).

I will lay out a different theory. Everyone is responsible for their behavior. Everyone has made their bed and must lie in it. Even people with crushing burdens or handicaps or disabilities have endless ranges of options and outlooks in a free society. There’s nothing wrong with helping people but people aren’t helpless, and they’re not victims. There’s never an excuse to hurt another person, except in strict self-defense. Mental illness might be a terrible burden, but people are still responsible for their behavior, which means they’re responsible for addressing the illness. Not only are people responsible for their crimes and mistakes and their harms toward other people, they’re responsible for their weaknesses and their faults. Why? Because if they’re not, no one is. Everyone is responsible for who they become. Everyone is ultimately responsible for improving their situation and there’s no one to blame if they don’t. What does blame (or reprieve) matter anyway? That’s the terrible mistake at the core of this reasoning. Excusing people from accountability doesn’t help them, in a policy context or in their personal lives. I feel more certain about this than almost anything. I myself have a mental illness (what doctors call ‘substance use disorder’) and I’ve seen it for myself, hundreds of times: those who rise to the occasion and embrace ownership and make the necessary choices and changes have a chance to treat and overcome their terrible burden (which is never chosen). Those who don’t do not. They have no chance. SUD is an identity category-but so what? It’s also a problem that must be solved, and only the person affected can choose to try and solve it. It’s like that with so many things in the world. By treating group members as unaccountable you give them an excuse and a person to blame but nothing else. The truly toxic fact is that as long as people are blaming others they will not grow and improve and overcome. They just won’t. You can choose to take ownership or you can refuse. You can feel grateful for what you have or you can focus on grievances. Every project of making yourself better starts with the belief that you have the power to make changes, and if you have that power than you have the responsibility for choosing the alternative. Every other approach is mere condescension and consolation. It will get you nowhere.

I’ve never seen an addict or a mentally ill person make deep and persistent improvements without embracing the concept of personal responsibility and getting motivated.

Now apply this truth to poverty and obesity and cowardice and academic failure and criminal recidivism.

There are countries where millions of people have no route to riches. There are people who don’t have the cognitive faculties to exceed in school. There are people who have such excitable amygdalae that they just don’t have it in them to be brave, or even calm. There are real limits in this world. All you can do is the best you can do, and if you’ve done that then no blame can touch you. The concepts of ‘blame’ and ‘stigma’ or products of people who consider the opinions of other people to be paramount. They’re not. Live your life and do your best-and this requires an understanding of ultimate personal responsibility.

There are real policy barriers to be amended and reforms to be made. Millions of schoolkids in the United States require stabler homes and better teachers to realistically flourish. We should work for those things-but we should also recognize that those kids have a responsibility for their own lives. This isn’t about blaming people (victims or otherwise). It’s a deeper reality than blame or shame or reward. Every person has the inherent spiritual duty and ability to make their own life into whatever they will. Reforms and egalitarianism and progressive taxation schemes and changes to the criminal justice system can and must stand alongside that reality. Every successful person already knows this-they applied it in their own lives. The attitude that somehow the poor or the fat or the distracted or the traumatized don’t have this duty and this ability is the grossest kind of patronizing disdain. Make people’s lives easier and fairer, by all means. But understand that, in a fairly free society, they ultimately have immense power over their own outcomes. Changing barriers and opportunities and resources will never change the fact that most people aren’t willing to commit themselves and sacrifice for worthy goals. This is a problem that can only be solved one person at a time, but it can’t be compelled. Most people will generally choose to easy way, even if it means poverty or mediocrity or drudgery or dysfunction. Most people suck.

Agency & Equity

The social world is complicated and layered and multivariate. You can immediately dismiss basically everyone who tries to reduce extraordinarily complex conditions like GDP or crime rates or high school test scores to a single variable, especially if that variable just happens to be the one thing their ideology is most concerned with. That is the extremely thin epistemological ice that the SJI crowd finds itself on: focusing on systemic variables to the exclusion of everything else. I’m perfectly willing to admit that there is privilege and that wealthy kids have enormously greater resources than poor ones and that black people or immigrants or women face their own statistical (average) burdens. I think in most cases such things are pretty marginal but social science can yield insight into this question. If someone wants to tell me that parental resources give a student a boost of 40% and white privilege a boost of 30%, then I would probably dispute the numbers but I can engage with them. Instead, many on the Left truly claim that privilege is 100% of the equation! They never state this explicitly (it sounds pretty ridiculous when you put it in those terms), but they only focus on privilege. They’re not trying to understand society-they’re trying to change it (by their own admission). Go through sociological papers about academic racial disparities. Attend trainings and read materials and listen to policy lectures about the problem. Privilege is all that’s discussed! The assumption is that privilege is paramount and other factors (which are demonstrably more crucial) like study habits and family structure and IQ are neglected completely. In fact, bringing these factors up is, in many cases, a cancellable offense.

Agency matters. Work and interest and honesty and intellect are not variables which can be reliably shifted by policy (and certainly not by funding the programs we already have in place). People suck. Students are lazy and shortsighted and distractable and often quite stupid, and that would still be the case even if all of their parents were granted $5 million. Resources aren’t the main issue here-certainly not in the United States.

In fact, because people suck and students are lazy, improving their scores and opportunities and college placements will-in many, many cases-simply lead to lazy and stupid students with better scores and more opportunities and expanded placements. If white privilege is 50% of the equation, then equity measures might produce a fairer outcome, overall. If it’s 10% than they can often backfire. If it’s 5% or less (which is what I believe the data indicates) then you’re simply artificially boosting less capable candidates. If you believe that students are naturally gifted and energetic and curious, then you might believe that expanding opportunities can increase capabilities. But if a person is putting out low levels of effort and ignoring small academic challenges, then rewarding them and advancing them won’t benefit anyone. Students are lazy. People aren’t born intellectually engaged. Ambition is usually inculcated (to some extent) at home and is deeply culturally mediated. Most people usually operate without a great deal of it. People can rise to amazing heights and achieve great things, but not if their grades and wealth and status are simply handed to them. That tends to encourage complacency, entitlement, laziness. People will usually opt for the easy, the comfortable, the status-laden, the false. People suck.

In his fascinating essay Who’s Afraid of Oscar Lewis,

Bryan Caplan

describes the awkward position of a doctrinaire Marxist who spent a career researching and documenting certain poor slices of society.

In the 50s and 60s, Oscar Lewis could easily have been the world’s most famous anthropologist. He wrote a whole series of painstaking ethnographies of poor families from Mexico, Puerto Rico, and India. My 12th-grade AP Government class actually made his Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty required reading.

They are, as

Bryan Caplan

writes, “fascinating on a meta level.”

Lewis describes social worlds full of impulsive sex, poor work habits, substance abuse, violence, and cruelty to children in appalling detail… Lewis basically confirms [the] “reactionary” view that poverty is largely caused by irresponsible behavior of the poor themselves. After all, impulsive sex, poor work habits, substance abuse, violence, and cruelty to children are very bad ways to make extra money or stretch tight family budgets. Any sensible low-income person would avoid them like the plague.

Of course, this kind of material is very difficult to reconcile with the progressive worldview, and it would never be published today (despite being apparently very accurate and thorough). There’s an excellent litmus test for those who support speech codes and progressive orientations within academia: should research be published to implies that the habits and beliefs of poor people are their own worst enemies? No matter what you believe this is sometimes surely the case. Should our papers reflect the truth when it appears? As with most things, social justice ideologues don’t want to reckon with these kinds of realities. They don’t want to argue with or disprove them-they want them to disappear altogether, even if that leads to weaker research and questionable conclusions.

As

Bryan Caplan

writes (addressing the orthodoxy of Lewis’ work, which blamed capitalism for all of these sloppy and foolish and sometimes tragic behaviors):

…frankly, it’s absurdly dogmatic. The irresponsible behavior that Lewis describes has existed in every known society, so how can you possibly blame it on “capitalism”? Far fewer lives are “continually haunted by poverty” in capitalist societies that in pre-capitalist or socialist societies, so again, how can this possibly be capitalism’s fault? Even if you believe capitalism is designed to keep workers obediently working for peanuts, where is the profit in fostering a subculture of impulsive sex, poor work habits, substance abuse, violence, and cruelty to children? From the viewpoint of the executive committee of the bourgeoisie, the ideal world is one where everyone – including the poor – internalizes the traditional work ethic and traditional family values, so disciplined workers bees can focus on doing their work and raising the next generation of disciplined worker bees.

How can you believe that poor people are victims of circumstance when poor people in the modern United States are far richer and freer than better and more responsible people in other places and times? How can you focus on systemic variables to the exclusion of every other factor (family setting, culture, outlook, integrity, personal responsibility)?

Perhaps it seems that I’m drawing this picture too starkly. But I don’t think so. Posit the possibility that urban black crime (overwhelmingly committed by small groups of antisocial recidivists) is largely due to a broken culture, or the absence of father figures… and watch the progressive reaction. There’s a deep emotional reflex at play here, which I don’t fully understand (as I don’t possess it). I’m not trying to draw especial attention to pathologies in certain cultures. I use the same standard for everyone. It is the social justice people who are applying different rubrics. To them I would say: treat and conceptualize poor black communities just as you do poor white ones (for which low intelligence and irresponsibility and sexual promiscuity are easily allowed as disastrous factors), for they’re all humans. Everyone is guided by culture and sets priorities and reacts to incentives. Where are the structural barriers in this picture?

A thought experiment: If you erased racial differences tomorrow (turning all black people white, or all humans green) you’d still have lazy workers and rude students and greedy eaters and dishonest citizens. You’d still have broken households and thefts and child neglect and sexual recklessness. The criminal penalties might marginally change, and certain interactions might become less fraught or unequal, but this hypothetical change would eliminate very few of our current social problems. Can anyone deny this? Apparently many can.

Bryan Caplan

:

If you’re a Marxist who idolizes the working class, unions, and “the downtrodden,” we should expect you to “find” that the poor are blameless victims of a wicked society.

Lewis’ research is credible precisely because his findings clash with his ideology and loyalties. And that’s why his left-wing critics are strategically wise to condemn him. When non-leftists say that irresponsible behavior is a major cause of poverty, you can plausibly object, “Sure, that’s what reactionaries like you find.” But when a life-long Marxist says the same, logic tells you to change your mind. Or kill the messenger.

Privilege

White men are certainly more privileged than other groups. They can’t blame anyone else for their failures or mistakes. They’re pushed to be accountable for their outcomes. Ironically, this leads to better outcomes for them. Their privilege lies in their exclusion from the victim bonuses and excuses and manipulative whining. They won’t get anywhere (most of the time) by making up a sad or dramatic story, so they don’t bother. This is the nature of white (and male) privilege.

If personal accountability creates growth and fosters good outcomes, then privilege would be whatever conditions inculcate sense of personal accountability. This is exactly what we see. What creates senses of agency and responsibility? Having two parents in your home who love and instruct you in the world is the fundamental ingredient here. Two-parent homes have much better outcomes for the adult income of those kids, their disciplinary record in school, their likelihood of arrest… and their own propensity to form a broken family as adults.

These is literally the most influential major variable for all of these outcomes.

If you want to become a remarkable person you’ll need to overcome handicaps, develop wisdom, cultivate your lifestyle, and remain lucid and compassionate through it all. No one gets to this place without suffering. I think that Jung described the process of actualization better than anyone (confronting one’s shadow, growing through and around the world’s challenges) but I’ll save that topic for another essay. For now, I’ll leave you with this: “I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”

If you want to help someone, teach them that they have the ability and responsibility to help themselves. This is the only lesson that can help people grow and overcome difficulties and make better lives for themselves. No amount of government aid or selective preference or disciplinary clemency will have such a powerful effect. People who internalize this lesson can do truly amazing things. Misfortune is constant and life isn’t fair, but your best shot is to give it your best shot. No one can do it for you. Of course, most people won’t do this (no matter which agency intervenes, or which celebrity ‘raises awareness’). Most people will wallow in excuses, and blame others, and cling to short-term comfort. They’ll clutch whatever privileges and possessions they already have, afraid of the world and of change. Most people will always be cowardly and weak.

People suck.

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The Lie of The Unconstrained Vision