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Pongo2's avatar

On the Rufo-Singal thing: I agree with the broad point your making and I plan to bring it up to Jesse on his callin at some point. Three Caveats:

1) I think Jesse Singal is constitutionally incapable of understanding the point you're making because he's a member of the 'Thinker' class who is almost uniquely genuine and principled in his commitment to ideas and therefore constantly frustrated by the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of his peers. People like him have an important role in our society and he fills it well but this isn't his niche.

2) Although your points about the successes of Rufo's activism and his refreshing honesty about it are generally correct, I think it should be mentioned that Rufo appears to me to be an obvious case of high-functioning narcissistic personality disorder and shows all the signs of riding a narcissistic high at the moment. I'd wager the odds of a spectacular collapse in the near future are good and when the fall comes it may very well take a lot of the success he's had with it.

3) Predictable caveat that although Rufo and I share a few enemies he's a partisan republican and, I suspect, a christian theocrat whose medium and long-term goals are pretty incompatible with mine and, I suspect, yours.

When it comes to the broader point about activism I had the thought recently that modern activism reminds me a lot of 16th-17th century european nobility. Basically the nobility of this era owed its position to the military successes of their medieval ancestors who had lived in a much more chaotic world than them as a result of this pedigree to be a young man of this class was to be raised to believe martial virtue was paramount and that what made you better than other people was your military honor. This predisposition of the ruling class likely led to many unnecessary wars (this was the era in which war was the 'sport of kings'). I think a similar thing is happening to our elite youth with regard to political activism. Activism is held up as the moral idea to strive towards, universities have told the most privileged members of Gen Y and Z that they are the generation that was promised and that their calling is to go forth and activize to make the world better. Having predetermined that this is their mission in life, people go out in search of a cause.

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Mike T's avatar

Really fantastic essay Sarah. The dichotomy of "the thinker vs. the activist" is one of the most helpful and illuminating comparisons I can remember reading. It's up there with Khanamen and Traversky's "system 1 vs system 2." I have always embraced the "thinker" mindset in my life and never really given any thought to the idea that one could approach things in a different way. I understood that some people were more Machiavellian than others, but never really understood the idea some people just had a different alignment to what it meant to be "right." I simply viewed most public thinkers under a one dimensional axis of "intellectually dishonest" vs. "intellectually honest." Obviously this wasn't all I cared about, but I just viewed intellectual honesty as a virtue that some had more of than others.

In many ways this dichotomy sort of gets at different ideas about what constitutes truth. There are certain kinds of truth (typically those that can be tested through the scientific method) that are objective and have no bearing based on whether or not people agree on them. Force of gravity, water is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom etc. However, there are other truths that exist more or less because we all agree on them. We all agree that the United States as a country exists, but that is only because enough people believe in its existence. This is basically Noah Yuval Harari's idea he expresses in Sapiens. As it relates to your essay, I think the thinker cares more about the objective truths, while the activist has to be more concerned with the agreed upon truths.

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