2020 Report Card on some of the achievements and struggles of men compared to those of women.
Before a woman decides that men have it easier, she might want to consider this list. This is not a comprehensive list. Admittedly, women fare worse than men in many situations.
We don't give to receive, but that's how human nature works, as pointed out by Shane Parrish at Farnum Street.
I think people are afraid. They don’t recognize the power of this rule. And they’re afraid that by going first and giving resources, giving time, giving attention, giving samples, and so on, they might just be losing that. They’re not cognizant of the fact that there’s such a strong rule in every human culture that says you must not take without giving in return.— Robert Cialdini
At this post I will collect passages suggesting the reasons why people, especially young people, are going Woke.
I start with Bari Weiss:
All of this has taken place against the backdrop of major changes in American life—the tearing apart of our social fabric; the loss of religion and the decline of civic organizations; the opioid crisis; the collapse of American industries; the rise of big tech; successive financial crises; a toxic public discourse; crushing student debt. An epidemic of loneliness. A crisis of meaning. A pandemic of distrust. It has taken place against the backdrop of the American dream’s decline into what feels like a punchline, the inequalities of our supposedly fair, liberal meritocracy clearly rigged in favor of some people and against others.
See also,
What has happened is these young people now getting to college have no sense of history – of any kind! No sense of history. No world geography. No sense of the violence and the barbarities of history. So, they think that the whole world has always been like this, a kind of nice, comfortable world where you can go to the store and get orange juice and milk, and you can turn on the water and the hot water comes out. They have no sense whatever of the destruction, of the great civilizations that rose and fell, and so on – and how arrogant people get when they’re in a comfortable civilization. They now have been taught to look around them to see defects in America – which is the freest country in the history of the world – and to feel that somehow America is the source of all evil in the universe, and it’s because they’ve never been exposed to the actual evil of the history of humanity. They know nothing!
I will add other passages below as I encounter them . . .
Are Tourette Symptoms a new form of social contagion? A new article from the Wall Street Journal intrigued me. The title: "Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor." Here are the opening paragraphs:
Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors’ offices with tics—physical jerking movements and verbal outbursts—since the start of the pandemic.Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.
According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.
No one has tracked these cases nationally, but pediatric movement-disorder centers across the U.S. are reporting an influx of teen girls with similar tics. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who specializes in pediatric movement disorders and Tourette syndrome, has seen about 10 new teens with tics a month since March 2020. Before the pandemic, his clinic had seen at most one a month.
I'm intrigued for a couple reasons. Back in college I spent some timing hanging around with guy who was smart and funny. He was also a really good tennis player and he had an easy going confidence.I was a several years younger than he was and I was not feeling confident about who I was at age 17. He also had a tic. Occasionally, his head suddenly jerked while he talked. This happened every couple minutes. After a while, I noticed that I was starting to do that too. The fact that I started doing this seemed odd, because I didn't decide to do it. It just started happening. I consciously clamped down on that behavior and I stopped doing it a few after I noticed myself doing it.
I'm also interested in this article because of the social contagion angle related to the sudden spike in teenaged girls who claim they were born in the wrong bodies. I'm speaking of the transgender social contagion phenomenon discussed extensively by Abigail Shrier (and see here).
Two days ago I returned from hiking/photographing Yellowstone National Park for a week. Being in such an immense beautiful place, I was able to turn my mind off of the many things I do or attempt to do in my normal life. Hiking in Yellowstone, I merely walked about, noticing beautiful things and trying to take photos that hit the sweet spot, a task that is largely intuitive. I looked for images that would work as pretty photos or as works of art (I blend some of my photos with numerous texture and blending layers on Photoshop). As I hike and take photos, I tend to think of only those few things and I tend to not think much in words, which is a wonderful change of pace from my normal life. Somehow I don't think of much other than what is in front of me and it calms my ADD-ish monkey mind).
Now that I am back home, I am tempted to think in many directions at one time, whether it be processing the photos, reminiscing about the trip, planning another trip someday, reaching out to treasured friends, working as an attorney, trying to understand the culture wars, writing an article (or two or three), working out, walking in the nearby park, playing or composing music and many other things/distractions/opportunities. I am lucky to live a life where these things are realities. But what should I do when there are so many things I want to think about and do? I am in my mid-60s, which lends a bit of urgency to this quest, because I don't know how many more active years I will have, physically and mentally. This quandary/opportunity reminds me of the following quote by Frederick Nietzsche (aphorism #249 from The Gay Science):
Oh, my greed! There is no selfishness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs of eyes and hands—a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” --Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.