Maggie's Farm

Williamson discusses people who appear to live without a sense of personal agency:

 I am, as it happens, evicting my mother’s fourth husband’s fifth wife from a modest house (much more modest than the condition I left it in) in which she resided rent-free for a decade or so. I inherited the house from my mother when she died, and her husband inherited a “life estate” in it, meaning a legal right to reside there so long as he kept current on the taxes and such. He remarried (these are marrying people) and lived there with his new wife until his life estate ended the way life estates end, and I came around to take possession of the house and sell the damned thing. They’d had years and years to prepare for this moment, and, of course, they hadn’t.

These are, in fact, like some of the people Murray describes as residents of Fishtown. They are full of excuses for their disappointing and feckless lives. In my experience, the passive voice reveals that these are people who lack the inner resources to act affirmatively or planfully, to adapt to change or bad luck, adjust, or to learn from experience. It is sad to see, and there is no cure for it. Lots of boats, and lives, end up on the rocks.

In another era, they might have done fine on the family farm with the support, resources, and teamwork of an extended family and a small, healthy community. The post-agricultural, post-industrial world today is far more demanding of us all. It's tough out there.

These books comprise the core knowledge that is fundamental to the naval profession in the US

From a commenter on Microaggressions Put Under the Scholarly Microscope

 To be human, interacting with other humans, is to enter a world in which as Object being perceived, we emit an infinite series of unconscious cues (how we walk, how we talk, how we look, our tone of voice, our gaze, our height, our weight, what we say, what we do, how we say & do these things, etc.). These cues are then received by the Other who, in turn, as Subject, subconsciously filters & interprets them according to an infinite set of paradigmatic beliefs, stereotypes, experiences, and insights.

They say we form first impressions within approximately seven seconds.

Roger Simon claims that his generation, the "pre-Boomers," should be called "the least-great generation."

 So who were we if not the boomers? How would you name us? You could call us the Generation of 1968, because that was when we made our most enduring mark, when the “whole world was watching” as the chant went from the Chicago Democratic National Convention of that year. It seemingly never stopped. But a better title for us would be the Least Great Generation, because that’s what we were. Maybe the Ungrateful Generation. We may have contributed significant amounts to the lifestyle—music, films, fashion, food—but as the years rolled on and centuries turned, it became ever clearer that we were callow, even selfish, inside. All our neo-Marxist declarations, recycled through hippiedom or not, were meaningless. We were just Eliot’s “Hollow Men” in hipster attire. Worse than that, we had—consciously or unconsciously or both—worked to unwind everything our parents had built. And it had its result, although not all of us desired it—or were later surprised by what we had wrought. These days the robust American exceptionalism that defeated the Germans and the Japanese and then rebuilt those despotic societies as still-functioning democracies in a virtually unprecedented manner is a distant, almost forgotten, memory.

Possibly an interesting new book: Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind

Arnold Kling mentioned it here. It seems to be about how people adapt to change, or fail to. Rules of the game change. Life can be like Calvinball. Winners adapt, losers fail to adapt. One must be quick on one's feet in life, like a hunter.

The latest Mike Pence furor is not really a clash of political ideologies. It’s a clash of anthropologies, a clash of two incompatible worldviews about human nature. He quotes Ta-Nehisi Coates:

 I’ve been with my spouse for almost 15 years. In those years, I’ve never been with anyone but the mother of my son. But that’s not because I am an especially good and true person. In fact, I am wholly in possession of an unimaginably filthy and mongrel mind. But I am also a dude who believes in guard-rails, as a buddy of mine once put it. I don’t believe in getting “in the moment” and then exercising will-power. I believe in avoiding ‘the moment.’ I believe in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not; why I am going to a party, and why I am not. I believe that the battle is lost at Happy Hour, not at the hotel. I am not a ‘good man.’ But I am prepared to be an honorable one.

It's a a good piece about the apparent assumptions about basic human nature. Avoiding problematic temptation isn't just about Christianity though. It's also about maintaining self -respect and reputation. I believe that, with humans, sex, personal advantage, neediness, money, power, dominance, etc. are always at work but that there are many other more admirable things at work too.  This is all quite obvious.

Outside Hollywood, public figures have to be especially alert to seductions by star-f-ers, blackmailers, users, and the like, so they have an extra character challenge. Happily being a non-public figure, I meet with women colleagues and clients all the time. Never had a problem with myself but I have had to awkwardly handle a few attempted seductions when I was younger.

It is no longer in fashion to talk about how women take advantage of men for their own purposes. Women have power of many kinds, but the current batch of Lefty women prefer the victim image.