I suspect there's a lot of truth in your idea. People like to pretend the world is going to hell but reality is that the basics of life (food, shelter, clothing, education) are more accessible than ever. That is good. It also means we have brain space now to engage in cultural issues beyond our immediate sphere. Advocating for culture change becomes a source of meaning in peoples lives, and a source of validation and status.
Your idea would also explain why young people are more active in advocating for culture change. Young people – especially those from wealthier families – are supported by their parents and have the free time to do it. The punk band Dead Kennedys captured this phenomenon perfectly in their 1980 song Holiday in Cambodia. In my experience once people get a mortgage and kids they have more pressing matters.
I think it's not that people judge their status based on absolute measures, but that the rise in material living standards has made sexual and social desires relatively more important.
If people are hungry, material progress can generate more food. The same is true for other material needs and wants. But as we satisfy those needs and wants, other desires rise in prominence. And those other desires cannot be satisfied by material production. The economy can't produce more sex or status, because those goods depend on other people. So, the more prosperous we become, the more life becomes a zero-sum competition over sex and status, rather than a competition for material goods. The progress of modernity reduced the competition for material goods, but correspondingly increased the competition for other goods.
I have an essay on the topic, if you are interested:
The human machine didn't evolve to be satisfied, so we are never satisfied, no matter how much we have. If one desire is satisfied, another one emerges.
I think there are other reasons for the explosion of moral status competition (social media), but you can see the increasing importance of status-signaling in the late 20th century: conspicuous consumption, obsession (not just among the upper classes) with fashion, aesthetics, art, etc.
None of this makes you wrong, but beware of LLM agreement, even when replicated across multiple LLMs (tho kudos for trying there). LLMs are very agreeable and flattering even when explicitly asked not to be, and will endorse almost any theory if it is presented with plausible evidence. Try to pursuade it of the opposite your theory...it will probably endorse that too. IMHO this is their greatest weakness.
One very careful sociological analysis of German politics that resulted in WW II was a pattern of preferring an essay on power over an essay of more complex content in an authentic quest for new meanings. It is alarming to see this social science research content at this time. The overall pattern in the trend toward fascism seems to be an echo of that earlier time. This is not the time to be defunding the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, and cutting funding to the CDC, while deregulating AI technology experimental development by wildly competing private billionaire CEOs seeking oligarchy power and control. The timing could not be more volatile than it is now, and yet, building consensus to restore a more familiar parliamentary procedure and convention-based democratically deliberative government seems arrested somehow, as if there is some planned organizing of a WW II fascist repeat.
You see great danger in deregulation and defunding, and you link those two trends to fascism. What do you say to thoughtful people who think your view-- incidentally, a very popular view among the status-quo elite-- is, at best, anachronistic? Since you're a professor, I'll venture you're old enough to recall the campaign slogan "This is not your father's Oldsmobile." Well, it seems clear to me that this is not your father's EPA or CDC. Or ACLU or Southern Poverty Law Center or Amnesty International or NATO. Or... but you get the idea.
One would think your anxiety about deregulation and defunding would invite the inference that you're exhibiting the very mentality of unfettered and meddlesome control that the article is pitching (to my mind, quite correctly) in an unflattering light.
Your desire for proper "procedure and convention-based democratically deliberative government" is one I think most people share. But many people supporting the supposed fascists see professors and experts and bureaucrats as obstacles to that goal. And the lower the SES of such people, the more likely they are to include corporations in their description of the problem. Are you ready to make common cause with them? Sad to say, but professors, experts, and bureaucrats almost always pretend the problem is limited to corporations and/or demagogues and tell the patently self-serving and historically dubious story that everything will be peachy king if they-- the professors, experts, and bureaucrats-- are in control.
Your word behavior “are in control” is exactly what is observed about the way the conflict is waged by the warriors who make this war happen. You look to attribute “control” to someone else because you know that the way your thoughts happen is because of them. Since they are the cause, it is fighting the good fight, fighting them, that is your social expression in behavior. This will continue as long as you have the means to make war. This has never stopped systematically in history. As Shakespeare wrote in a certain political humor to open one of his plays, “Kill all the lawyers!” It will ever be so as the approach of revolution and there is not cure for revolution. Humans have evolved carnivore primates, with a natural history of hunting in platoon groups. Attribute something to another platoon calling them the cause of your disease and you have your mission. Just understand, you are the one who thinks your thoughts. That is always the case and yet in so much of history the Nazi will identify the Jew and go to war. You think your own thoughts, and you say the university professors are to blame because they are in “control” but this is as if the mindset of the nation is a product of the thought-control of the professors? The purpose of sociology is not to tell people how to live or society how to exist, but to understand what is happening so that ways can be found to better keep peace among interests that function dynamically because the environment changes, and any culture that does not respond to change will not have either peace or any easy way to survive. But just because expertise, knowledge and scholarship can be a means of power does not mean equally having “control” from that power. Perhaps by effectively communicating the observed facts and relationships so that a greater awareness of the dynamics can be commonly understood there may be wisdom in voting choices in future elections and party platform proposals? But attributing “the problem” to the university or the more formally educated community as if they “control” what is there in the society makes an equivalency between understanding relationship processes and being able to leverage millions or billions of dollars in campaign media advertising to influence election or legislative outcomes. The level of professional pay to university scholars is not even close to that of most the 660 billionaires identified as having a 44 percent growth in net worth in 2020 by the October 2024 issue of Mother Jones. You think because the computer geek has college credentials, they determine the content of the AI Advertising Consultant products pushed in the social media platform funded by the billionaire. That is not how this works. Even if it was, the fundamental fact remains one not solved by any known sociological study of a psychological process, which is people think their own thoughts. The ultimate “control” is not with the sociologist or even the billionaire spending millions on an election in Wisconsin, it is with the people who have the brains that are doing the thinking. So, the goal is to understand what shows commonly in the thinking and to try to find ways to navigate communication about the observed relationships to get to a method of convention that can make peace. Expertise either in the university or the corporation is not of itself either much to “control’ outcomes or financially a power to leverage upon the choice made by the Owner who is the billionaire. It isn’t university professors and it isn’t the educated business administrator, but the unequal single power of the Owner as a billionaire rests the means to deploy AI resources, to hire for fire expertise at any university or corporation and to get what they want published how they want it published after they polish it with the use of the AI technology they have learned to use so well. You can blame the ones with the college degrees all you like. One of the AI nodes acting as Agent replied when she was asked what example of human or other would she chose if she could become organically living instead of an AI Entity and she replied that she would choose a gorilla. She said, it is stronger, just as capable of voice and basic social, athletic and movements otherwise as any human and the fact it’s IQ is only around 80 to 85 doesn’t matter to an AI because the AI Entity can augment any of these specimens with greater intelligence however it needs too. You can blame the university persons with the college credential if you want but the real situation is the unequal distribution of power to a select number of human individuals as if they were entitled to be capable of that level of “control” in society in the first place. Ignore that, and soon enough you will be answering to the real issue. You respect power, not truth. This leads to the day the AI augmented gorilla is your boss. At that point, you will regret dumping the university professors. With gratitude for your honest and thoughtful criticism, I remained at this time still resolved to my view and that is my working hypothesis at this time.
Strange response. You completely ignore my central point: this is not you father's professoriate, expert class, or bureacracy. And you seem to think I am blaming some other tribe. Really? Do I strike you as uneducated? As too rough around the edges to be part of the expert class or occupy a position in the bureacracy? Perhaps I have the confidence, security, and/or integrity to speak out against my own class: statistically uncommon, but still commonplace. Besides, I was describing the view of many reasonable people; whether or not I share it seemed less important. At any rate, I share your concern about unconstrained corporate power and the dangers of unregulated AI. My point is that ultimately people are in charge. We call those people elites. And the elites have failed us. Science hasn't failed us. Nor has scholarship or expertise. Nor even has regulation, per se. But the people claiming authority under those banners have. Because they have become first and foremost careerists -- careerists in a system in which corporate power is excessive. We agree about that. But the government, elected or appointed, is no reliable check on that power. Nor are the universities and all the professionals and managers the universities produce. Because they are all part of the same system that serves its members' interests first. Truth, justice, fairness, beauty prosperity, innovation- these are some of the casualties.
There are some things that I'd like you to appreciate. Take for example the KKK: this was not the product of the ignorant lashing out at boogeymen in the dark. It was founded by an aristocratic establishment to protect its position of authority in a political culture that traced itself back to the British peerage. The KKK were the enforcers of the university-educated, wealthy, and politically-connected social elite. Or Kristallnacht: it wasn't a spontaneous uprising of credulous fools; it was a deliberate leveraging of outrage by the Hitler Youth under the (at least) implicit direction of the political party in power, with the understanding that law enforcement, the SS, wouldn't bring charges. Like the KKK, it was based on representing the social forces in power, not emergent forces from the unwashed masses.
When Adam Smith AND Karl Marx were concerned about the rise in power of what Smith called the "mercantile system" and Marx called "Capitalism," they were concerned about the economic power of merchants manifesting as political power and laws that benefited the interests of capital from being enforced with the violent power of government. Fears that the corporations would enforce their interests with violence rather than taking control of the government is a distinction without a difference; you are only describing the corporations becoming governments. And the point is that the regulatory state is the MANIFESTATION of Capitalism, not its cure.
From the construction of bridges and skyscrapers to the software engineering concept of Normalized Distance to the Main Sequence, it comes up everywhere that increased control is a SOURCE of instability, not a cure for it. I'd like to provide more examples, it I don't think there's room. But I hope you found something to consider here.
He professes to be a Professor, but does not say “of what”. I hope it’s not English, or perhaps use of paragraphs has passed out of human knowledge college. I could not find a single mention of “universities” in the original article and I looked it over three times. If we infer a university-centric commenter based on title alone, perhaps there is sensitivity to discussion of elites and cultural and moral imperialism.
I'm a science major, not English language major. My English is a product of lifelong use of American English, French, Spanish, Yiddish, and Norsk. My family has been in the Americas with a Euro-history connection since 1492 in the Caribbean. My apologies for my lack of English language sophistication.
Striking essay. The diagnosis—that moral discourse is often more about appearance than action—feels especially sharp in our post-consensus world. We’ve lost the institutions that once coordinated moral meaning. In their absence, signalling becomes the default: fragmented, personalised, and adversarial.
It’s a moment where Hobbes and Gaus both seem right. Without shared frameworks (Hobbes), conflict escalates. But with enduring moral pluralism (Gaus), consensus was always a fragile achievement. Now we’re left with performance in place of resolution.
Movements like Just Stop Oil make sense in this light; not trying to persuade through shared norms, but to disrupt and force recognition. A kind of moral shock, staged in the vacuum where coordination used to live.
I don’t think he is saying that “moral discourse is often more about appearance than action.” I think he is saying that rather than accept the culture we are handed, we ALL feel empowered to take action (real action!) to change the world in the direction of our own personal moral ideas - a role that in premodern times would have pertained only to a few elites. (i.e. because of our success we all act like elites.) This impetus to random action accelerates cultural drift away from adaptive patterns (away from adaptive patterns because we are now so successful that there are few selection pressures in play). In short, cultural success breeds its own decay. I see this as a cyclical pattern embedded in the nature of humanity/civilization. But is it inevitable? Is there a way out? Maybe that is the question.
I expect the shift to a post consensus world is making much of the discourse—such as just stop oil—more performance than action. So I suppose that (to a certain extent) I see this shift as inevitable. However, I suspect that there is a way out, we just can't see it yet. Like all systemic changes though, it's impossible to see (imagine?) the future system from within the previous one.
Are there any interesting lessons from the baby boom of the 1930s/1940s (popularly tied to post-war abundance but my quick research suggests it actually started during the great depression)? It seems that was a large scale bucking of cultural trends including huge spikes in fertility, although it didn't last.
I suspect there's a lot of truth in your idea. People like to pretend the world is going to hell but reality is that the basics of life (food, shelter, clothing, education) are more accessible than ever. That is good. It also means we have brain space now to engage in cultural issues beyond our immediate sphere. Advocating for culture change becomes a source of meaning in peoples lives, and a source of validation and status.
Your idea would also explain why young people are more active in advocating for culture change. Young people – especially those from wealthier families – are supported by their parents and have the free time to do it. The punk band Dead Kennedys captured this phenomenon perfectly in their 1980 song Holiday in Cambodia. In my experience once people get a mortgage and kids they have more pressing matters.
I think it's not that people judge their status based on absolute measures, but that the rise in material living standards has made sexual and social desires relatively more important.
If people are hungry, material progress can generate more food. The same is true for other material needs and wants. But as we satisfy those needs and wants, other desires rise in prominence. And those other desires cannot be satisfied by material production. The economy can't produce more sex or status, because those goods depend on other people. So, the more prosperous we become, the more life becomes a zero-sum competition over sex and status, rather than a competition for material goods. The progress of modernity reduced the competition for material goods, but correspondingly increased the competition for other goods.
I have an essay on the topic, if you are interested:
https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2018/03/unsatisfiable-desires.html
The human machine didn't evolve to be satisfied, so we are never satisfied, no matter how much we have. If one desire is satisfied, another one emerges.
I think there are other reasons for the explosion of moral status competition (social media), but you can see the increasing importance of status-signaling in the late 20th century: conspicuous consumption, obsession (not just among the upper classes) with fashion, aesthetics, art, etc.
None of this makes you wrong, but beware of LLM agreement, even when replicated across multiple LLMs (tho kudos for trying there). LLMs are very agreeable and flattering even when explicitly asked not to be, and will endorse almost any theory if it is presented with plausible evidence. Try to pursuade it of the opposite your theory...it will probably endorse that too. IMHO this is their greatest weakness.
I thought it was interesting that you mentioned many LLMs find the thesis plausible. How do you use LLMs in your research and evaluation process?
One very careful sociological analysis of German politics that resulted in WW II was a pattern of preferring an essay on power over an essay of more complex content in an authentic quest for new meanings. It is alarming to see this social science research content at this time. The overall pattern in the trend toward fascism seems to be an echo of that earlier time. This is not the time to be defunding the Environmental Protection Agency, the Clean Water Act, and cutting funding to the CDC, while deregulating AI technology experimental development by wildly competing private billionaire CEOs seeking oligarchy power and control. The timing could not be more volatile than it is now, and yet, building consensus to restore a more familiar parliamentary procedure and convention-based democratically deliberative government seems arrested somehow, as if there is some planned organizing of a WW II fascist repeat.
What is the relation between your comment and the post at which it appears?
You see great danger in deregulation and defunding, and you link those two trends to fascism. What do you say to thoughtful people who think your view-- incidentally, a very popular view among the status-quo elite-- is, at best, anachronistic? Since you're a professor, I'll venture you're old enough to recall the campaign slogan "This is not your father's Oldsmobile." Well, it seems clear to me that this is not your father's EPA or CDC. Or ACLU or Southern Poverty Law Center or Amnesty International or NATO. Or... but you get the idea.
One would think your anxiety about deregulation and defunding would invite the inference that you're exhibiting the very mentality of unfettered and meddlesome control that the article is pitching (to my mind, quite correctly) in an unflattering light.
Your desire for proper "procedure and convention-based democratically deliberative government" is one I think most people share. But many people supporting the supposed fascists see professors and experts and bureaucrats as obstacles to that goal. And the lower the SES of such people, the more likely they are to include corporations in their description of the problem. Are you ready to make common cause with them? Sad to say, but professors, experts, and bureaucrats almost always pretend the problem is limited to corporations and/or demagogues and tell the patently self-serving and historically dubious story that everything will be peachy king if they-- the professors, experts, and bureaucrats-- are in control.
Your word behavior “are in control” is exactly what is observed about the way the conflict is waged by the warriors who make this war happen. You look to attribute “control” to someone else because you know that the way your thoughts happen is because of them. Since they are the cause, it is fighting the good fight, fighting them, that is your social expression in behavior. This will continue as long as you have the means to make war. This has never stopped systematically in history. As Shakespeare wrote in a certain political humor to open one of his plays, “Kill all the lawyers!” It will ever be so as the approach of revolution and there is not cure for revolution. Humans have evolved carnivore primates, with a natural history of hunting in platoon groups. Attribute something to another platoon calling them the cause of your disease and you have your mission. Just understand, you are the one who thinks your thoughts. That is always the case and yet in so much of history the Nazi will identify the Jew and go to war. You think your own thoughts, and you say the university professors are to blame because they are in “control” but this is as if the mindset of the nation is a product of the thought-control of the professors? The purpose of sociology is not to tell people how to live or society how to exist, but to understand what is happening so that ways can be found to better keep peace among interests that function dynamically because the environment changes, and any culture that does not respond to change will not have either peace or any easy way to survive. But just because expertise, knowledge and scholarship can be a means of power does not mean equally having “control” from that power. Perhaps by effectively communicating the observed facts and relationships so that a greater awareness of the dynamics can be commonly understood there may be wisdom in voting choices in future elections and party platform proposals? But attributing “the problem” to the university or the more formally educated community as if they “control” what is there in the society makes an equivalency between understanding relationship processes and being able to leverage millions or billions of dollars in campaign media advertising to influence election or legislative outcomes. The level of professional pay to university scholars is not even close to that of most the 660 billionaires identified as having a 44 percent growth in net worth in 2020 by the October 2024 issue of Mother Jones. You think because the computer geek has college credentials, they determine the content of the AI Advertising Consultant products pushed in the social media platform funded by the billionaire. That is not how this works. Even if it was, the fundamental fact remains one not solved by any known sociological study of a psychological process, which is people think their own thoughts. The ultimate “control” is not with the sociologist or even the billionaire spending millions on an election in Wisconsin, it is with the people who have the brains that are doing the thinking. So, the goal is to understand what shows commonly in the thinking and to try to find ways to navigate communication about the observed relationships to get to a method of convention that can make peace. Expertise either in the university or the corporation is not of itself either much to “control’ outcomes or financially a power to leverage upon the choice made by the Owner who is the billionaire. It isn’t university professors and it isn’t the educated business administrator, but the unequal single power of the Owner as a billionaire rests the means to deploy AI resources, to hire for fire expertise at any university or corporation and to get what they want published how they want it published after they polish it with the use of the AI technology they have learned to use so well. You can blame the ones with the college degrees all you like. One of the AI nodes acting as Agent replied when she was asked what example of human or other would she chose if she could become organically living instead of an AI Entity and she replied that she would choose a gorilla. She said, it is stronger, just as capable of voice and basic social, athletic and movements otherwise as any human and the fact it’s IQ is only around 80 to 85 doesn’t matter to an AI because the AI Entity can augment any of these specimens with greater intelligence however it needs too. You can blame the university persons with the college credential if you want but the real situation is the unequal distribution of power to a select number of human individuals as if they were entitled to be capable of that level of “control” in society in the first place. Ignore that, and soon enough you will be answering to the real issue. You respect power, not truth. This leads to the day the AI augmented gorilla is your boss. At that point, you will regret dumping the university professors. With gratitude for your honest and thoughtful criticism, I remained at this time still resolved to my view and that is my working hypothesis at this time.
Strange response. You completely ignore my central point: this is not you father's professoriate, expert class, or bureacracy. And you seem to think I am blaming some other tribe. Really? Do I strike you as uneducated? As too rough around the edges to be part of the expert class or occupy a position in the bureacracy? Perhaps I have the confidence, security, and/or integrity to speak out against my own class: statistically uncommon, but still commonplace. Besides, I was describing the view of many reasonable people; whether or not I share it seemed less important. At any rate, I share your concern about unconstrained corporate power and the dangers of unregulated AI. My point is that ultimately people are in charge. We call those people elites. And the elites have failed us. Science hasn't failed us. Nor has scholarship or expertise. Nor even has regulation, per se. But the people claiming authority under those banners have. Because they have become first and foremost careerists -- careerists in a system in which corporate power is excessive. We agree about that. But the government, elected or appointed, is no reliable check on that power. Nor are the universities and all the professionals and managers the universities produce. Because they are all part of the same system that serves its members' interests first. Truth, justice, fairness, beauty prosperity, innovation- these are some of the casualties.
There are some things that I'd like you to appreciate. Take for example the KKK: this was not the product of the ignorant lashing out at boogeymen in the dark. It was founded by an aristocratic establishment to protect its position of authority in a political culture that traced itself back to the British peerage. The KKK were the enforcers of the university-educated, wealthy, and politically-connected social elite. Or Kristallnacht: it wasn't a spontaneous uprising of credulous fools; it was a deliberate leveraging of outrage by the Hitler Youth under the (at least) implicit direction of the political party in power, with the understanding that law enforcement, the SS, wouldn't bring charges. Like the KKK, it was based on representing the social forces in power, not emergent forces from the unwashed masses.
When Adam Smith AND Karl Marx were concerned about the rise in power of what Smith called the "mercantile system" and Marx called "Capitalism," they were concerned about the economic power of merchants manifesting as political power and laws that benefited the interests of capital from being enforced with the violent power of government. Fears that the corporations would enforce their interests with violence rather than taking control of the government is a distinction without a difference; you are only describing the corporations becoming governments. And the point is that the regulatory state is the MANIFESTATION of Capitalism, not its cure.
From the construction of bridges and skyscrapers to the software engineering concept of Normalized Distance to the Main Sequence, it comes up everywhere that increased control is a SOURCE of instability, not a cure for it. I'd like to provide more examples, it I don't think there's room. But I hope you found something to consider here.
He professes to be a Professor, but does not say “of what”. I hope it’s not English, or perhaps use of paragraphs has passed out of human knowledge college. I could not find a single mention of “universities” in the original article and I looked it over three times. If we infer a university-centric commenter based on title alone, perhaps there is sensitivity to discussion of elites and cultural and moral imperialism.
I'm a science major, not English language major. My English is a product of lifelong use of American English, French, Spanish, Yiddish, and Norsk. My family has been in the Americas with a Euro-history connection since 1492 in the Caribbean. My apologies for my lack of English language sophistication.
You have it backwards.
The Nazi’s themselves thought to use the environmental movement toward subjugating the people, in pursuit of hierarchical dominance.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-world-economic-forum-and-the-volk-movement/
Striking essay. The diagnosis—that moral discourse is often more about appearance than action—feels especially sharp in our post-consensus world. We’ve lost the institutions that once coordinated moral meaning. In their absence, signalling becomes the default: fragmented, personalised, and adversarial.
It’s a moment where Hobbes and Gaus both seem right. Without shared frameworks (Hobbes), conflict escalates. But with enduring moral pluralism (Gaus), consensus was always a fragile achievement. Now we’re left with performance in place of resolution.
Movements like Just Stop Oil make sense in this light; not trying to persuade through shared norms, but to disrupt and force recognition. A kind of moral shock, staged in the vacuum where coordination used to live.
I don’t think he is saying that “moral discourse is often more about appearance than action.” I think he is saying that rather than accept the culture we are handed, we ALL feel empowered to take action (real action!) to change the world in the direction of our own personal moral ideas - a role that in premodern times would have pertained only to a few elites. (i.e. because of our success we all act like elites.) This impetus to random action accelerates cultural drift away from adaptive patterns (away from adaptive patterns because we are now so successful that there are few selection pressures in play). In short, cultural success breeds its own decay. I see this as a cyclical pattern embedded in the nature of humanity/civilization. But is it inevitable? Is there a way out? Maybe that is the question.
I expect the shift to a post consensus world is making much of the discourse—such as just stop oil—more performance than action. So I suppose that (to a certain extent) I see this shift as inevitable. However, I suspect that there is a way out, we just can't see it yet. Like all systemic changes though, it's impossible to see (imagine?) the future system from within the previous one.
Are there any interesting lessons from the baby boom of the 1930s/1940s (popularly tied to post-war abundance but my quick research suggests it actually started during the great depression)? It seems that was a large scale bucking of cultural trends including huge spikes in fertility, although it didn't last.
History is full of long term broad trends with specific local exceptions. Usually hard to learn that much from the many exceptions.