Split Thread Are post-feminism women happier?

[shuttlt]

New topic split from: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=356361

Posted By: Darat

Normal <> Allowable

No, indeed.... a certain amount of deviation from the norm is tolerated in all societies. However, functioning societies are geared towards the interests of the norm, since they are the ones that keep society going. I suspect the more counter to the interests of the norm some deviation is, the less tolerated it will be in a functioning society. A society that privileges the deviant over the norm is engaging in cultural suicide.

I wasn't talking about "allowable" though, I was talking about things being "normalised". The progressive programme has not been to accept that there are a few CEOs who people keep mistaking for secretaries, or that some poor benighted men wander around the fringes of society wearing wigs, bad makeup and enormous stilettos. The project is to queer society so that there is no normal for these people to be excluded from, or better still to invert the pyramid and replace what was normal with what was deviant.

Which side of your mouth are you planning to argue out of? On the one hand, you're arguing that attempting to overcome socially imposed prohibition of behavior on the basis of sex is irrational and a losing argument... and on the other hand you're arguing that acknowledging evolutionary instincts is also irrational and a losing argument. I don't see how you can possibly hold both views without some sort of massive cognitive dissonance.

I'm losing the thread here a little. I was attempting to follow the logic that was of wanting to escape the societal baggage of femininity and then claim that "woman" is some special category that needs protecting. What is special about women that I should care about them more than short wimpy men? If you define women in a materialist way, you ditch all the stuff that makes them special and worth defending.

I don't think I said anything about acknowledging instinct as being irrational. Sure, women have all these instincts and feel threatened by men blah blah blah. But if you have reduced women to some materialist definition, then as I said, you have ditched everything worth defending about women. At that point why, beyond you not liking it, not count trannys as women? The category is debased anyway.

You seem to be extending all of my views to a black-and-white end point of absurdity, rather than engaging in my actual views.

The thing is that I disagree with you about where your views lead. I think they lead to particular endpoints. You saying "but I don't like that endpoint" isn't an argument. I probably don't like that endpoint either.

I'll be honest - right now, what I am inferring is that you hold a rather traditionalist view.

Certainly. Wildly traditionalist by the standards of the forum.

You aren't supportive of transgender policies, not because you have any concerns about the erosion of female rights, but because they transgress the hard line gender roles of what is acceptable male behavior and comportment and what is acceptable female behavior and comportment.

No. This is the problem with liberals. Because liberalism is founded on these "rational" self evident universal principles and somehow everything stems deductively from that you assume that is how everybody else operates. Again, no! I think counting trans-women as women will make men and women unhappy. I'm not deducing that from moral principles, I'm looking at the world and trying to understand what men and women are actually like. Has feminism made women happier?

I have no moral vision for men and women that I want to realise. I'm not offended by the idea of a female general, or a female CEO. However, I think this is a road that leads to unhappiness and chaos if it's perused as a moral good. If I thought there was a pot of gold over the rainbow where progressivism delivered what it promised and a happy stable socanety came out of it I would view the whole thing completely differently.

You appear to be arguing that males should NOT be allowed socially to dress in female clothing, or to use female spaces...

I don't know about not allowed, but I am deeply sceptical that anything good is going to come out of encouraging that.

while also arguing that females do NOT merit any accommodations or protections due to our reproductive role and vulnerability.

You have completely misunderstood me. I don't believe females, when reduced to some materialist idea of what a woman is, are worth any special consideration at all. That isn't how I view women though. I am not a materialist. From my perspective, it is insane and a sign of the collapse of some critical aspect of society that there is even a conversation about whether women should have to accept unwanted men into their changing rooms and that we should be expected to pretend that men are women.

Please feel free to assuage my concerns by restating your position.

I hope I have clarified things. I tend to argue by trying to reframe other peoples positions and following them through to their conclusions, I think sometimes it comes across as if the position was mine.

 

[shuttlt]

Lol, of course you wouldn't. As a male, you aren't the one facing those strictures.

Are women happier today because of all these changes? Anyway, I think men and women co-create society... I'm not at all sure that the traditional social order is a creation of men enforced by men without input from women. Men had their duties in the old order too. Your analysis derives from the marxist class analysis with an oppressed and oppressor class that feminists picked up and did a search-replace on in the 60s. I think it's as misguided about the sexes as it is about class.

So then. In this thread, we have a male opining that females should just accept the role that males think females should have, and shouldn't seek to be independent beings with their own agency and volition. How very, very patriarchal of you.

This is a marxist-feminist understanding of the world. I have very little to say about it because I think the whole thing is wrong. The world is a difficult place that men and women must find a way through together. Having women go on this quest to gain unfettered access to the imagined goodies of maleness, led by a group of marxist man-hating hyper-masculine lesbians (yes I'm being hyperbolic) has been great for capitalism, but unfortunate for society.

There are advantage and costs to being a man that women cannot take on. There advantages and costs to being a woman that a man cannot take on. The idea that this base materialist analysis that counts CEOs and average wages and imagines it is working out who is better off is ridiculous. The type of relationship my wife had with my kids is inaccessible to me and rightly so, because I am not their mother. The time that my wife spent with them growing up is far greater than the time I spent, and rightly so because she is their mother. Have I trapped her? How do you quantify which one of us is taking advantage of the other?

Feminism is a revolutionary movement that in its modern form derives from Marxism. It inherits from marxism a base, materialist conception of what is important in life and what has value - at least when it is comparing women with men for the purposes of complaining. The value of womens work and the reward of womens work are put at zero if it is unpaid in this conception. I disagree with that completely.

You guys are radical progressives pursuing egalitarian dreams right up until the point the revolution starts to go to work on you. Then you turn into conservatives.

 

[Rolfe]

Am I happier because I had a good career in a field I both enjoyed and was good at, followed by a comfortable retirement provided entirely by my own efforts, or would I have been happier as the maiden aunt existing on the fringes of other people's families and getting by on a pittance?

What do you think?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Are women happier today because of all these changes? Anyway, I think men and women co-create society... I'm not at all sure that the traditional social order is a creation of men enforced by men without input from women. Men had their duties in the old order too. Your analysis derives from the marxist class analysis with an oppressed and oppressor class that feminists picked up and did a search-replace on in the 60s. I think it's as misguided about the sexes as it is about class.

I am most definitely happier. Most of the females I know are happier. I do, however, know quite a few males who insist that females are NOT happier because females can only be happy if they are at home raising children and being dependent on a male for their survival.

Also, marxism is dumb. While there may have been some element of marxism involved in feminism... I rather think that looking around the planet and across history and seeing that females have been consistently and repeatedly abused, treated as chattel, denied the ability to be economically independent of males, and prohibited from full participation in society, economics, and politics is rather enough of a goad for females to fight back. Nothing more is actually needed.

 

[shuttlt]

Ah, the privilege of one who will never be denied the means of making a livelihood due to the absence of this "Platonic good".

The only thing that looks to be denying people a livelihood today is this bizarre chimera of progressive-global-corporatism. I'm certainly not. I've seen plenty of advantages and career boosts being given to women because they were women and people who were hired and promoted because they were women.

I am interested in a society where as many people as possible can be happy and content. Please do not lecture me as if gender equality in the workplace is a question of livelihoods.

True story. I told my riding instructor, when I was about fifteen, that it was my ambition to become a veterinary surgeon. He said, "they won't let you in [to university] because you'll get married."

Ok. My mother tells similar stories about the difficulty of getting a cheque book.

I still remember my reaction. There was a tiny moment of "is it really possible I might meet someone with whom I come to a mutual decision to get married?", before my instinctive realisation that this was not going to happen kicked back in. The overwhelming thought was "how am I going to make a living for myself, in a vocation that attracts me, if this is the situation? I have to live.

For almost all of human history nobody had this kind of freedom, and didn't expect this kind of freedom. Not men, not women, nobody. Liberalism and corporate capitalism has gradually built this up as a "good" that everybody wants and now we expect it and crave it like my son craves his XBox. That doesn't mean that my sons life has actually been improved by getting an XBox, I deeply regret buying it... it doesn't mean that the world before the XBox was a barren wasteland.

I will need money. I don't want to spend my life in some tedious low-paid job because some man on a university admissions committee thinks women don't need a profession because they'll find a man to provide for them."

Well, you grew up at the point where the old certainties were dying or dead and in the culture that was creating the world we have today. The world that these forces have created casts the individual very much adrift and I very much have felt the same sense of looking out at the world and wondering how I was going to navigate through it. Welcome to the world the Enlightenment built.

Well, obviously I knew better than the riding instructor. I knew they did accept women on to the course I wanted. I became bloody determined to make sure I was one of them. And in the event I showed up only the year after these men on the university admissions committee had explicitly decided "to stop ignoring the brains of half the human race" (the Dean's actual words) and simply admit on aptitude and vocation without regard to sex.

Fifty years on and the balance has skewed a long way to the other side, as it turns out that if you don't discourage women from considering it, it's more like the music society than the football match. And that might be having consequences I'm not crazy about, but that's another story.

And for all that, are women happier today? I read that story, and I just see "person who grew up in a particular political milieu has the hopes and aspirations of her times".

The point is, it may be a platonic idea to be discussed in the abstract by a man, but to a woman it's the difference between a satisfying, wel-remunerated career and having to become a school teacher or something because nothing else is available.

All aspirations that come from liberalism. Liberal societies often prioritise things that liberalism says are good, and people who grow up in liberal societies want those things. If you'd grown up 500 years ago you'd have had a completely different set of hopes and aspirations. If my son had grown up 20 years ago he'd read more and wouldn't miss TikTok. In these things, we are products of our age.

 

[shuttlt]

Am I happier because I had a good career in a field I both enjoyed and was good at, followed by a comfortable retirement provided entirely by my own efforts, or would I have been happier as the maiden aunt existing on the fringes of other people's families and getting by on a pittance?

What do you think?

I didn't ask "are you happier?". I asked "are women happier?". This whole process has changed women's expectations, as well as their possibilities and the demands on them. There are trade-offs there. When you answer the question, you are answering it with the expectations already baked in. That isn't what I am asking. Has the whole process of transferring pressures and expectations onto women that previously only fell on men made them happier or unhappier? It's not obvious to me that it has. One would have thought it would be very obvious and easy to demonstrate given how you see the previous state of affairs compared to the present one. There must be some striking graphs where women are unhappy for hundreds of years and then there is some kind of hockey stick in the graph around 1970 as women are liberated. Is that what the graphs show, or does liberal capitalism create its own demand in women and then supply it by sending women out to work? Work sets you free etc...

 

[shuttlt]

I am most definitely happier. Most of the females I know are happier. I do, however, know quite a few males who insist that females are NOT happier because females can only be happy if they are at home raising children and being dependent on a male for their survival.

Could you evidence that women are actually happier. Happiness has been pretty well studied and surveyed for many decades. Presumably there will be graphs that show a bunch of despondent women and then women start getting happier and happier from the 70s onward? That women who grew up in a consumerist, corporate liberal culture with the expectations feel they need the things that culture promotes to be happy and probably wouldn't be happy without them really doesn't answer the question.

Also, marxism is dumb.

Yes, and no. A lot of very smart people were marxists.

While there may have been some element of marxism involved in feminism... I rather think that looking around the planet and across history and seeing that females have been consistently and repeatedly abused, treated as chattel, denied the ability to be economically independent of males, and prohibited from full participation in society, economics, and politics is rather enough of a goad for females to fight back. Nothing more is actually needed.

And yet there have been plenty of women on both sides, arguing for and against on all of these great feminist leaps forward. Your view of history isn't intrinsically obvious to people just because they have vaginas. It's like you see in Democrat discussions on race.... conservative blacks are racially black, but not politically black. All those women you talk about may be physically women, but they didn't become politically women until radical politics got in there.

 

[shuttlt]

Incidentally, I know I've asked a couple of times whether all this has made women happier and I've had all this pushback about how it's made you individually happier. The reason I'm asking is that there is a ton of survey data going back decades that shows women getting unhappier absolutely and relative to men, and the unhappiness correlates with all the things you are in favour of like access to education and employment.

After all of these changes, women are less happy now than they were in 1972, whereas men are happier. I'm linking to this article, just because it makes me smile to post a link to Huffpo:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whats-happening-to-womens_b_289511

"All told, more than 1.3 million men and women have been surveyed over the last 40 years, both here in the U.S. and in developed countries around the world. Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men."

Obviously you can find people rationalising this finding, but it seems rather stark to me. After half a century of society being reorganised around the demands of women's activists, women are now less happy than at the start. The positive side is that maybe in the end the autogynephiles won't be made happy by having their demands met either.

 

[Meadmaker]

Are women happier today because of all these changes?

It's hard to say, because you can't measure it in any real, scientific, manner, but it seems to me that the answer is yes.

 

[Roboramma]

Could you evidence that women are actually happier. Happiness has been pretty well studied and surveyed for many decades. Presumably there will be graphs that show a bunch of despondent women and then women start getting happier and happier from the 70s onward? That women who grew up in a consumerist, corporate liberal culture with the expectations feel they need the things that culture promotes to be happy and probably wouldn't be happy without them really doesn't answer the question.

I don't have across time data, but here's a comparison across countries showing "gender equality" correlates with life satisfaction. (scroll down a little bit):
https://genderpolicyreport.umn.edu/gender-equality-supports-happiness/

 

[shuttlt]

I'd say it's older than that, there's something in modern egalitarian values in the way hunter-gatherer societies were organized as well.

Ian Morris, I think, has a point, this book:
https://www.amazon.com/Foragers-Farmers-Fossil-Fuels-Values/dp/0691160392


While they don't completely align with your views, you might find his ideas interesting.

Thanks. I'll take a look. Right out of the gate though, I'm seeing points that I disagree with. Is it really true that most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good? This feels like wishful thinking to me. Do the Chinese agree with this? Do the arabs? There are some quite old school attitudes to gender in large parts of Africa and India.

 

[Roboramma]

Thanks. I'll take a look. Right out of the gate though, I'm seeing points that I disagree with. Is it really true that most people in the world today think democracy and gender equality are good? This feels like wishful thinking to me. Do the Chinese agree with this? Do the arabs? There are some quite old school attitudes to gender in large parts of Africa and India.

I wouldn't read too much into the amazon blurb. He does address that point, though I can't say whether or not you'd be satisfied with how he addresses it.
I'm certainly not endorsing the entire thesis, though I do find it a useful framework in at least some ways.

One thing that's interesting about the book is that he devotes several chapters to responses by his critics. After presenting his thesis in 5 chapters, he devotes 4 chapters to critics of his view (one each to Richard Seaford, Jonathon Spence, Christine Korsgaard, and Margaret Atwood). The final chapter is his response, titled: "My Correct Views on Everything", which I thought was a fun touch.

I'd say your objection is similar to the one made by Seaford, not only in "do fossil-fuel societies really have those values?" but also "did farming societies really tend to have the values Morris attributes to them?"
But I think the link does generally hold up. For instance, I live in China (for almost 20 years now) and while it may not seem to have an egalitarian culture in comparison to my native country (Canada), its certainly egalitarian in comparison to China of 100 years ago. Based on data I've seen that's true of Arab countries as well.

 

[shuttlt]

I don't have across time data, but here's a comparison across countries showing "gender equality" correlates with life satisfaction. (scroll down a little bit):
https://genderpolicyreport.umn.edu/gender-equality-supports-happiness/

Keen to know what you think of the data I posted. Again HuffPo of all people described it thus:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/whats...omens_b_289511

"All told, more than 1.3 million men and women have been surveyed over the last 40 years, both here in the U.S. and in developed countries around the world. Wherever researchers have been able to collect reliable data on happiness, the finding is always the same: greater educational, political, and employment opportunities have corresponded to decreases in life happiness for women, as compared to men."

I just find that impossible to square with the feminist description of the previous state of women, the extent to which they have managed to change western society and not only have women not got happier, they have got less happy, while men have got happier.

***************************************************
Looking at your article, my thoughts are this.
1. Given that it is well established that, despite the extravagant claims, women have not been made happier by feminism, why are we looking for proxy and secondary ways of trying to find an effect? Wasn't the traditional patriarchal society this horribly oppressive thing? And yet after all these changes, women are less happy.

It's like how you get claims for psychic powers, and then you do a bunch of tests and maybe there is an effect possibly that could be flipping 1 in every 50,000 throws of a coin. There was supposed to be some big effect, this is a bait and switch.

2. As my data showed, women have gotten less happy, men have got happier. Your data averages them out, so you'd expect to see no effect.... which for the reasons below, I think is the case.

3. If I count it correctly, you have 21 countries in the plot that is claiming to show an effect. 20 of those are either European, or founded by Europeans and the other is Japan. All the countries are clumped together in a big blob with no obvious correlation except Japan, Greece and Portugal which is pretty much the total effect. They are outliers. Japan is a completely different culture to the others, meanwhile Greece and Portugal are the poorest countries per capita in the list. Look how dependent their best fit line is on those three countries vs all the others. There is no real effect.

4. I'm suspicious of artificial compound metrics like GEM scores. If the trans-activists came up with some compound, weighted measure of femininity that showed there was no difference in femininity between trans-women and women, would you find that convincing? I deny that the creation of these metrics is free from political bias. I also think there is a huge problem with per-capita wealth correlating with the GEM score. What are we actually measuring?

5. Why that list of countries? Gem scores are available for 93 countries (https://www.rrojasdatabank.info/hdr20072008tab29.pdf). So, they've taken a subsample of countries that all have a similar culture.... and Japan. You can already prove anything if you play these games. Then look at the satisfaction axis.... "We combined these data with data from the World Values Survey and the Eurobarometer survey, as well as other common predictors of life satisfaction". So they take a way of calculating satisfaction from here for country A, and a way of calculating it from there for country B and then smerge it all together with some other ways of calculating it. Again, you can get any outcome you want from this.

6. It seems to me that the difference between most of those countries in terms of gender equality today, is far less than the difference between each of those countries today and the same country in 1972. Yet when we look at the big difference in equality, we see the opposite of what we should.

***************************************************

Again, study after study has shown women are less happy today than they were in 1972. What is the point in looking for small between country effects where you average men and women? All these societal changes demanded by feminism have achieved what? Before the changes, when feminism says women were being oppressed by men, women were happier than men. After those changes, now that the cruel oppression of men has been lifted, women are less happy, and less happy than men.

The basic assumptions and understanding of the world and men and women that feminism has are simply wrong, and on average, makes women less happy.

Given how little difference this long established trend has made.... is the actual motivation here really to make women happier, or some kind of ideological mission, or to promote the kind of driven top few % of the distribution for whom maybe the world feminism has built is suited?

 

[Meadmaker]

I don't have across time data, but here's a comparison across countries showing "gender equality" correlates with life satisfaction. (scroll down a little bit):
https://genderpolicyreport.umn.edu/gender-equality-supports-happiness/

The inescapable conclusion is that it is very difficult to measure happiness in surveys.

 

[Roboramma]

Keen to know what you think of the data I posted.

Honestly, I think you may be right.

I do think the issue is somewhat complicated. I can see how changes in social norms have shifted us away from an equilibrium that was more generally aligned with our nature, and that had a negative impact on people in general. But at the same time, more freedom to choose is generally a good thing for people's individual happiness. The problem that you've identified happens, in my view, not so much because of ideas of freedom of choice, but because of other ideas related to the sexes being identical.

 

[Roboramma]

The inescapable conclusion is that it is very difficult to measure happiness in surveys.

Yeah, and there's some good reason to think that within a particular country the data is relatively good but comparing between countries you're comparing apples to oranges.

 

[shuttlt]

Honestly, I think you may be right.

I do think the issue is somewhat complicated. I can see how changes in social norms have shifted us away from an equilibrium that was more generally aligned with our nature, and that had a negative impact on people in general. But at the same time, more freedom to choose is generally a good thing for people's individual happiness. The problem that you've identified happens, in my view, not so much because of ideas of freedom of choice, but because of other ideas related to the sexes being identical.

Is freedom to choose a "good thing for people's individual happiness"? For essentially the whole of human history the life of the overwhelming majority of people has not been a blank sheet of paper. I understand that ideologically within liberalism it is assumed to be a good thing for people's individual happiness, but is that actually true?

One way of looking at all the discomfort around the agricultural and industrial revolutions, the inclosures of the land etc... is people regretting the loss of a world in which there was security, stability, and community... but very little choice for a world that flipped all that upside down.

The thing about encouraging people to see individual liberty as a good is that it comes with a bunch of other enlightenment baggage of what you should use that liberty for. You should "make something of yourself". This is a force that is antithetical to the values of duty, community and tradition. It is a force that breaks up communities, that sends people off to seek their fortunes and away from the land that their ancestors have tilled for generations.

Did the shift from duty, community and tradition to individual liberty actually make us happier?

Part of this, I suppose is a problem with technology. Now there is the realistic possibility that somebody born in some village in some ******** country could decide to "make it" in New York and have some kind of worked out idea of what that would look like. I think there was an argument like that about the effect of Dallas and Dynasty, where one we would have only had the other people in our village to compare ourselves to.... now we are shown images of peak fake success that carry the message that we all can and should aspire to this. Instagram influencers have the same effect. This world of individual freedom has been one of gradually creating a harsher and harsher zero sum game where the difference between the winners and the losers gets ever greater.

The vision I have of liberty is a bit like They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

EXTRA THOUGHT: Liberalism is on one level of analysis the justifying myth of the merchant/banking class that took power from the old land owning class. The previous order had justified itself with the idea of the great chain of being. The merchants needed people to break away from the land and come and work in their factories and buy their products. Liberal values were how that was done. Now, there is a degree of inevitability to the process.... but has liberalism actually made people happier than they were before any more than feminism has?

 

[Roboramma]

Is freedom to choose a "good thing for people's individual happiness"? For essentially the whole of human history the life of the overwhelming majority of people has not been a blank sheet of paper. I understand that ideologically within liberalism it is assumed to be a good thing for people's individual happiness, but is that actually true?

Probably? I think I'm better placed to figure out what makes me happy than anyone else is, for the same reason I think a business owner is better placed to make decisions about how to run his business than a central planner is. I have a lot of fine grained detail about my own life, tastes, personality, reactions, etc, that isn't available to anyone else. All else being equal, I expect individuals to be better placed to make choices about how to live their lives than anyone else.
All else isn't always equal, and, for instance, having life experience can lead to better informed choices than none, so it's not like there's no place for listening to one's elders or the wisdom of tradition here.

Don't get me wrong, I think you're right that values related to community, duty, honor, tradition, etc. are undervalued in modern society. And I do also think there's a tradeoff between those values and values of personal liberty. But I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that peasant farming culture lead to greater human flourishing than current western norms of egalitarianism.

I mean, there's a pretty clear trend on this graph:
https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1507860165780856836/photo/1

Personally, I don't think the mistake has been embracing the concept of personal liberty. It's denying the fact that human nature exists. Embracing personal liberty doesn't mean denying the fact that we're a social species with a desire for community, or that there are very real sex differences. It's the latter that's (in my view) the problem.

If I read you correctly, you think the latter is a consequence of the former, but so far I'm not convinced of that.

 

[shuttlt]

Probably? I think I'm better placed to figure out what makes me happy than anyone else is, for the same reason I think a business owner is better placed to make decisions about how to run his business than a central planner is.

Are you? For one thing, you have, I suspect, been steeped only in this system, so I'm not sure what basis you could have for comparison. I'd certainly agree that somebody who has grown up in the modern west really isn't suited to live in an illiberal system. I would be terribly unhappy as a medieval peasant, but then a medieval peasant would not fit well into the modern west, I think.

Also, the logic here seems circular to me. One of the founding assumptions of liberalism, or at least progressive liberalism, is that freed from societal restraint humans are good and general make rational positive judgements. Your argument reduces to if one assumes liberalisms claims about the nature of the world, then liberalism is the best system.

Then, I think there is the issue that markets are only good at solving some types of problems. The tragedy of the commons is just the most famous way that they can produce perverse outcomes. China tried to restrict the market for opium. Were the Chinese people made happier by it being made readily available?

Then you have the question of whether liberal democracies really function like some kind of Adam Smith fair market where rational, informed actors freely interact with the products in a relationship where producers optimise their products to fit the consumers. I don't think so. They are constantly being marketed to and manipulated about what they should want, meanwhile there is market manipulation going on to control the available options in the market. This conception has culture as a purely bottom up phenomenon, which it isn't.

Finally, let's suppose people are happier now. In as much as that is the case, it is based on the requirement for constant growth that is baked into the mercantile system for which liberalism is the justifying narrative. The society of the great chain of being endured from the end of the Roman era until it was swept away by the Enlightenment. Saying that one is happy now is all very well, but it is just a point in time. To get us here, the liberal Enlightenment brought us the factories of the 19th century. It's also not at all clear that you can go on forever opening up new markets and expanding.

It just occurred to me that the rat utopia experiment is very relevant here.

https://www.girlschase.com/article/social-life/mouse-utopia-are-we-living-human-version

I have a lot of fine grained detail about my own life, tastes, personality, reactions, etc, that isn't available to anyone else. All else being equal, I expect individuals to be better placed to make choices about how to live their lives than anyone else.

Ok, but this is what I was calling in to question. Are people actually happier under liberalism? One can't use the assumptions of liberalism to prove that.

Don't get me wrong, I think you're right that values related to community, duty, honor, tradition, etc. are undervalued in modern society. And I do also think there's a tradeoff between those values and values of personal liberty. But I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that peasant farming culture lead to greater human flourishing than current western norms of egalitarianism.

Why? Those communities seemed to have been stable for long periods of time, and were closer to the sort of life we were evolved for. Left to himself, my son's free choice would be to look at TikTok and eat haribos all day. Is that actually a path to contentment? We chase ever more transient dopamine highs for doing ever more banal and pointless things while comparing ourselves to manufactured visions of success and unattainable fantasies of what "living your best life" would be like.

I mean, there's a pretty clear trend on this graph:
https://twitter.com/jasoncrawford/status/1507860165780856836/photo/1

Well, a couple of things there. First, I disagree that it is a clear trend. You have some ********* at the bottom left, in the top right you have the rich liberal countries and then you have a huge blob of the vast mass of countries where there doesn't seem to be any correlation.

Next, it isn't a measure of freedom.... it's a measure of satisfaction with your level of freedom. That is a measure that a medieval peasant might have said 100% to with complete sincerity. I mean, I'm not saying these people are wrong, but is Uzbekistan really the most free country on Earth? I looked it up on Wikipedia and it was described as "an authoritarian state with limited civil rights". Cambodia and Rwanda also seem like terrifically free places to live according to that graph.

I have more objections to it, but I don't want to go on.

Personally, I don't think the mistake has been embracing the concept of personal liberty.

I would say more that my objection is to the conception of liberty and most particularly putting liberty up on some kind of alter. This conception of liberty seems very mercantile to me. It seems to end up placing very high importance on the freedom to consume and the freedom to compete to produce. There was a type of liberty that was largely lost during the enclosures, and becomes a fainter and fainter memory every day. Is that not the kind of liberty that makes people happy?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Honestly, I think you may be right.

I do think the issue is somewhat complicated. I can see how changes in social norms have shifted us away from an equilibrium that was more generally aligned with our nature, and that had a negative impact on people in general. But at the same time, more freedom to choose is generally a good thing for people's individual happiness. The problem that you've identified happens, in my view, not so much because of ideas of freedom of choice, but because of other ideas related to the sexes being identical.

In this thread, males decide that females would be happier with less autonomy and agency.

The fact that the females in the thread disagree, is apparently irrelevant.