Rabbit Holes đłď¸ #87
From populists exploiting our relationship to time to the value of apprenticeships, 'boy culture' fostering loneliness, objects of desire, and climate obstruction studies
Quick one before we get into this weekâs Rabbit Holes:
If you enjoy this newsletter and want to see and help it grow, share it on LinkedIn and tag me. As a little thank you, Iâll like and comment on your post and share your profile or any project you want me to spotlight in my newsletter next week, right here on top. đ
And now, onto this weekâs issue:
THIS WEEK â
đłď¸ Rabbit Holes: Populism & Time // Apprenticeships // Boy Culture
𤯠Reframings: Life Hacks // Objects of Desire // Free Humans
đ¨ Creations: Climate Obstruction Studies // Nudge Community Builders
Rabbit Holes đłď¸
As always, 3 perspective-shifting rabbit holes to rewild your mind:
#1 â 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 (Iâm telling you my Friday deep dives are the shit! đ Donât miss out and subscribe!)
âOur 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. [âŚ]
Right wing populism takes advantage of the fact that democracy is slow by definition, and therefore increasingly unable to swiftly address peopleâs 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. [âŚ]
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 generationâs favourable view of âstrongmanâ 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 ârepatriatingâ migrants. Domestic and gender violence are, they argue, made up. In countries with peripheral nationalist movements, such as Spain, they promise to prohibit âsecessionistâ parties outright, a measure explicitly included in far right party Voxâs manifesto. [âŚ]
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.â
Âť The Conversation | The modern worldâs relationship to time is broken â and itâs fuelling the rise of the far right by Jesus Casquete
#2 đ ď¸ The Forgotten Value Of Apprenticeships
This piece relates to so many fascinating topics Iâve recently explored: adultism, the war on the young, reframing schooling, a world in which everyone is mastering the art of âwinging itâ 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 todayâs world:
âThe 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 âjourneyâ 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.â
âApprenticeships 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 âwork with woodâ 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. [âŚ]
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. [âŚ]
Today we associate almost all of our learning with what goes on in schools and laboratories, or with âbook learningâ. [âŚ] [However,] most knowledge is tacit or non-formal. It either has not, or perhaps even cannot, be written down as a proposition.
[âŚ] When an apprentice learns from a master, rather than learning formulas, proofs, and taxonomies they take in this tacit knowledge through a kind of âmonitored participationâ . 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. [âŚ]
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. [âŚ]
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.
Âť Skillful Notes | The Art of Training Young People by Benjamin Parry
#3 đŚ How âBoy Cultureâ 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 todayâs loneliness epidemic among men.
âEverybody thinks and feels, but weâve created a world in which men think, only women and gay boys feel, and straight men shouldnât feel. So, âboyâ 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 boysâ narratives, but from developmental psychologists who define maturity as âself-sufficiencyâ 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, âboyâ culture is in our definitions of maturity and manhood.
We also privilege the so-called âhardâ capacities and qualities over the âsoftâ 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 sensitivityâwe donât even have programs to foster emotional sensitivity. That is classic âboyâ culture, where weâre focused more on the regulation of emotions than being sensitive to each other around our emotions.
Another thing about âboyâ culture is the focus on STEM fields versus the humanities, arts, poetry, helping professions. We value kids going into STEM fields and donât value them going into the helping professions. We value money over people. âBoyâ culture is integrated with capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and heteronormativity; theyâre intersectional ideologies. This isnât coming from me, though. Itâs coming from boys and young men who remind us of the culture we live in. [âŚ]
If you grow up in a culture that only values that hard sideâcognition, stoicism, independenceâand donât 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 donât understand why you canât make the connections youâre trying to make. You donât understand why you donât have any friends, why nobody wants to spend time with you, or why youâre with a lot of people all of the time but not meaningfully connected. Itâs not your fault; itâs that youâre in a culture that doesnât nourish your full humanity. [âŚ]
The solution has to be to change our culture, which we can do, to better align with our natureâwhich is to value both our hard and our soft sides.â
Âť Greater Good Magazine | Why âBoy Cultureâ Is Hurting Boys and Everyone Else by Jill Suttie (interviewing Niobe Way)
𤯠Reframings
A few short reframings that Iâve recently stumbled across:
âIâve 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. Itâs 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.â â Toronto Ink Company
âI 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?â â Martin Brodsky
âSo 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 othersâ needs first, we stifle our own desires, or, worse, we forget we even have them. Iâm talking here about sexual desires, sure, but also other things we want in our lives. Itâs not just that we fear wanting certain things. Itâs the desiring in the first place that can feel so wrong.â â Anne Boyd
âThe 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 donât know their names, as they didnât 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 elseâs script of âthe origin of the stateâ â in which one could move away, disobey, experiment with other notions of how to live, even create new forms of social reality.â â David Wengrow
đ¨ Creations
Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations:
The Wonderbag // Dutch Network For Climate Obstruction Studies // Nudge Community Builders // Kotexâ âThis Is Not A Filmâ // Free Street Manifesto // A Board Of Little Directors // Phone-Free Friday Summer Challenge
Thatâs it for this weekâs Rabbit Holes issue!
Thanks for supporting my work! đ