Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #87
From populists exploiting our relationship to time to the value of apprenticeships, 'boy culture' fostering loneliness, objects of desire, and climate obstruction studies
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And now, onto this week’s issue:
THIS WEEK ↓
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: Populism & Time // Apprenticeships // Boy Culture
🤯 Reframings: Life Hacks // Objects of Desire // Free Humans
🎨 Creations: Climate Obstruction Studies // Nudge Community Builders
Rabbit Holes 🕳️
As always, 3 perspective-shifting rabbit holes to rewild your mind:
#1 ⌛ How Populists Exploit Our Broken Relationship With Time
More concretely, populists exploit our impatience and our longing for rootedness in a highly transient world. Super interesting take that relates to my recent deep dives into authoritarianism, why work needs degrowth, and the transience of everything (I’m telling you my Friday deep dives are the shit! 😜 Don’t miss out and subscribe!)
“Our world today moves at breakneck speed. We live in an era of same day delivery, of fast food and fast fashion. We listen to voice messages and podcasts at double speed, and the slightest doubt or curiosity is instantly satisfied by a quick search on our phones, bypassing any need for personal interaction or moments of uncertainty. Technology has made impatience the norm.
The same goes for the economy, which is governed by instantaneous decisions from stock markets on Wall Street, or in London or Shanghai. Even in households or at work, contingency and transience reign supreme. Wherever we look, the principle that time is money rules, and this has accelerated the pace of our lives. […]
Right wing populism takes advantage of the fact that democracy is slow by definition, and therefore increasingly unable to swiftly address people’s most urgent concerns. No other ideological current has recognised the extent to which our slow democratic politics is out of sync with the fast, even instantaneous, pace of our economies and societies, and exploiting this gap in the electoral market has paid huge dividends for them. […]
More and more voters agree that a strong leader who does not have to worry about parliament and elections is a good way to govern a country, and far right voters agree most strongly with this authoritarian drift. The younger generation’s favourable view of “strongman” leaders adds another layer of concern about the future of democracy.
In a world where patience is an increasingly rare virtue, and political systems lag behind, what right wing populists offer is politics built around haste, simplicity and shortcuts.
This is exemplified by a raft of blunt and impractical fast track solutions. To stem migratory flows they speak of closing borders or “repatriating” migrants. Domestic and gender violence are, they argue, made up. In countries with peripheral nationalist movements, such as Spain, they promise to prohibit “secessionist” parties outright, a measure explicitly included in far right party Vox’s manifesto. […]
Reversing this democratic regression is one of the greatest, most pressing challenges of our age, and any remedy will have to speed up political decision making processes without undermining the values that underpin democracy.”
» The Conversation | The modern world’s relationship to time is broken – and it’s fuelling the rise of the far right by Jesus Casquete
#2 🛠️ The Forgotten Value Of Apprenticeships
This piece relates to so many fascinating topics I’ve recently explored: adultism, the war on the young, reframing schooling, a world in which everyone is mastering the art of “winging it” instead of mastering a craft, and the importance of tacit, holistic knowledge or wisdom. A paragraph at the end of this piece resonates a lot with me and, I believe, is exactly what many young people are missing in today’s world:
“The reason that in early modern Europe an apprentice was called a freeman or journeyman at the end of their tenure was that they were qualified to be a 'free' citizen or to ‘journey’ out into the world. They were prepared to live and work in a city without restriction. The apprenticeship had liberated them not just economically but socially.”
“Apprenticeships work so well because the skills of the craftsman are holistic. If you go to a master carpenter you expect to employ someone who not only knows how to make a chair of a certain set of dimensions but someone who can “work with wood” along with all that such working entails. This calls for a kind of skill that is complex, generative, and fully embodied.
As industrial society developed however, rather than the well rounded craftsman of the early modern times we needed more individuals that could operate in a factory setting doing one thing very well. In such a model the need for a long period of training fell away. […]
The second shift was a cultural change that accompanied this economic change. We began to prioritize technical, formal and propositional knowledge over general, informal, and procedural knowledge. Instead of skills being learned on the job we imagined a world where the same skills could be taught just as well, if not better, in a classroom setting. […]
Today we associate almost all of our learning with what goes on in schools and laboratories, or with ‘book learning’. […] [However,] most knowledge is tacit or non-formal. It either has not, or perhaps even cannot, be written down as a proposition.
[…] When an apprentice learns from a master, rather than learning formulas, proofs, and taxonomies they take in this tacit knowledge through a kind of “monitored participation” . In other words they participate in the workshop of the master, and attempt to mimic them with feedback to let them know whether that participation and mimicry has been effective. […]
The importance of this tacit and holistic knowledge along with the long timespan needed to take it in is why the cultural assumption we have that schooling can replace the apprenticeship style relationship is a bad one. […]
Apprenticeships are a path to a thick skilfulness in a craft and a real solve for the problems of training and helping the next generation of young workers become productive members of the workforce, but they are also more than this.
» | The Art of Training Young People by Benjamin Parry
#3 👦 How “Boy Culture” Is Fostering Loneliness
This is a very eye-opening and touching interview with Niobe Way, author of Rebel Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, And Our Culture, who explains the ideologies and worldviews that are fostering today’s loneliness epidemic among men.
“Everybody thinks and feels, but we’ve created a world in which men think, only women and gay boys feel, and straight men shouldn’t feel. So, “boy” culture is the privileging of thinking over feeling, as well as stoicism over vulnerability, self over other, me over we, and independence over interdependence.
The evidence for this comes not only from the boys’ narratives, but from developmental psychologists who define maturity as “self-sufficiency” rather than the capacity to have mutually supportive relationships. As a grownup, you need to be able to have mutual relationships, but we emphasize self-sufficiency, autonomy, living on your own, financial independence, etc. So, “boy” culture is in our definitions of maturity and manhood.
We also privilege the so-called “hard” capacities and qualities over the “soft” ones. The whole field of developmental psychology has been obsessed with cognition for most of the 20th and 21st century, with some movement towards social neuroscience. We focus on emotional regulation over emotional sensitivity—we don’t even have programs to foster emotional sensitivity. That is classic “boy” culture, where we’re focused more on the regulation of emotions than being sensitive to each other around our emotions.
Another thing about “boy” culture is the focus on STEM fields versus the humanities, arts, poetry, helping professions. We value kids going into STEM fields and don’t value them going into the helping professions. We value money over people. “Boy” culture is integrated with capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity; they’re intersectional ideologies. This isn’t coming from me, though. It’s coming from boys and young men who remind us of the culture we live in. […]
If you grow up in a culture that only values that hard side—cognition, stoicism, independence—and don’t value the other half of your humanity, it creates a disconnected person. You have to cover over your [feeling side] and not be so sensitive, not care, focus on yourself.
Ultimately, this creates loneliness. You don’t understand why you can’t make the connections you’re trying to make. You don’t understand why you don’t have any friends, why nobody wants to spend time with you, or why you’re with a lot of people all of the time but not meaningfully connected. It’s not your fault; it’s that you’re in a culture that doesn’t nourish your full humanity. […]
The solution has to be to change our culture, which we can do, to better align with our nature—which is to value both our hard and our soft sides.”
» Greater Good Magazine | Why “Boy Culture” Is Hurting Boys and Everyone Else by Jill Suttie (interviewing Niobe Way)
🤯 Reframings
A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:
“I’ve always loved spending time with photographers not because of the way they capture moments or compose shots or manipulate light and angles to construct portraits. It’s not because of the making at all but because of the way photographers can peer into. The way they slow themselves to allow themselves to be pulled into visual situations. Or speed themselves up to slip between moments invisible to others. When I hang out with photographers the world feels re-enchanted.” –
“I was talking to a friend the other day about life hacks and he said: what if life hacks, in the end, make you a hack?” –
“So much of our training as women tells us that we are objects of desire rather than desiring subjects. We know this. . . . As girls we were often expected to please others, and as women we fear being called selfish. We put others’ needs first, we stifle our own desires, or, worse, we forget we even have them. I’m talking here about sexual desires, sure, but also other things we want in our lives. It’s not just that we fear wanting certain things. It’s the desiring in the first place that can feel so wrong.” –
“The world we live in today is not just the one created by the likes of Tiberius of Rome, or even Emperor Wu of Han. Until surprisingly recent times, spaces of human freedom existed across large parts of our planet. Millions lived in them. We don’t know their names, as they didn’t carve them in stone, but we know that many lived lives in which one could hope to do more than just scratch out an existence, or rehearse someone else’s script of ‘the origin of the state’ – in which one could move away, disobey, experiment with other notions of how to live, even create new forms of social reality.” – David Wengrow
🎨 Creations
Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations:
The Wonderbag // Dutch Network For Climate Obstruction Studies // Nudge Community Builders // Kotex’ ‘This Is Not A Film’ // Free Street Manifesto // A Board Of Little Directors // Phone-Free Friday Summer Challenge
That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!
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