WHAT IS REALLY WRONG WITH THE WEST?

The Leftist cries out in pain

by Duns Scotus 

In his recent YouTube video "How We Allowed Intolerant Neurotics to Become Parasites off Society," Professor Edward Dutton channels Nassim Taleb's book Skin in the Game and explains how tiny extreme minorities have been able to push Western societies increasingly to the left on a whole range of social issues. 

The power of minorities is not exactly news. Economist Mancur Olson was writing about this in more economic terms in the 1980s:

Both ideologies [Left and Right] are wrong in assuming that governments today systematically favor majorities at the expense of minorities. In fact, governments more often favor organized minorities with special interests. The protectionism enjoyed by the automobile makers, the steel producers and many other industries helps the firms and workers in those industries at the expense of the consuming majority. The labyrinth of subsidies and professional regulation in medicine does far more for the minority of providers of medical care than it does for the majority that consumes health care. The laws and rulings that make our legal system so costly and litigious are far more advantageous for the minority of lawyers than for the rest of the citizenry. Even such prosperous minorities as the owners of oil wells are subsidized by the society at large.

Now, however, minority power is much more a case of "weaponised" minority or micro-minority grievance. 

The problem as Taleb and Dutton see it is that the majority just want a quiet life—"free riders" in the language of Olson—and so are unwilling to put up resistance to noisy and upset minorities. 

Answering a rhetorical question in his video, Dutton explains in precise terms how the mechanism works:

So, how is it then that a tiny minority—a very, very small minority—can take over and push society in its direction and change the way that everyone else behaves? How does this work? Well Taleb notices that with a very, very small minority who are intransigent, who have certain views or certain desires that they won't change, they can take over firstly because [if] it's easier basically to conform to their demands than to not conform to their demands, then people will basically conform to their demands. Two, we tend to have a desire as pro-social people to want to placate those who seem upset, who seem unhappy, who seem hurts in some way. And thirdly, this is especially the case if we kind of like them, or, at the very least, if they can appeal to our sense of morality, if they have a cause such as 'equality' or 'harm avoidance' that appeals to us. And so, for these kinds of groups, the important thing is to be intransigent, and to be unhappy and emotional and whatever, and to make demands, but not so extreme that they are disliked. And they have to get that balance right, and as long as they get that balance right and they don't become so extreme that they cause a backlash and they are excluded from society, then they can effectively take over.

This is exactly how extreme feminism, gay marriage, BLM, and other extreme radical causes have became normalised, and thus imposed on the wider society. Because the squeaky wheel gets the oil, and the mass of society has been largely passive and quiescent.

But, this raises new questions. Why has the West become like this—so passive and tolerant that it can be pushed around by any tiny minority that seems upset about something?

Best to just give her what she wants.

Dutton mentions our "sense of morality," but more specifically refers to "equality" and "harm avoidance," while also mentioning the importance of "liking" those doing the pushing. 

It is instantly noticeable that this cluster of factors is tied to characteristically feminine traits. 

Masculinity is hierarchical by nature, emphasising aggression, competition, and inequality as a means of ascendance. The energy is generally vertical.

Femininity by contrast extols communication, empathy, solidarity, and popularity. The energy is generally horizontal. 

There is also an obvious Right-Left split in these masculine and feminine qualities.

From this, it is clear that the real problem the West has is that its culture, and thus its society and politics, has all been feminised. It is this that allows pushy minorities to have their way. Our feminised society treats any over-emotional, intransigent group like an unhappy child who must be coddled and soothed, and given what it wants. Unfortunately this kind of behaviour is more natural to the left winger than the right winger. A more masculine society, by contrast, would treat this kind of emotional blackmailing from intransigent minorities with much greater disdain and exclusion.