We must try to take off the technocratic hats

One does, of course, hesitate to say anything at all in the aftermath of a school shooting such as the one that happened in Texas a few days ago. (Well… at least I hesitate to speak. The people who do not hesitate to speak at all are probably not people you want to listen to.) But watching the response, especially on Twitter, I felt like I was watching a sort of repeat of our response to COVID - the situation was very different, but the technology-induced and technocratic psychology was the same. So I thought it was worth typing up a quick post to say, generally, “we have to make an effort not to think this way, not about shootings, not about viruses, not about anything. It causes more and new harm.”

So a few quick thoughts, here you go.

The solution is definitely another program

One, we saw an immediate call for more programs, more policies, more controls, to prevent this from happening again. The idea that a human problem can always be solved by another new program defines the technocratic mindset. There are many problems with thinking that way, but one very practical problem is that the number of new programs and new rules you are requesting is actually infinite.

Let me elaborate. Many people have been saying they just want these one or two new common sense gun control laws. I would like to say to those people - don’t fool yourself, that isn’t actually what you want. Now there are two groups of people that say things like that, right? One is political leaders, and many of them are just lying, they want total confiscation but it isn’t politically possible right now. Last week they voted to legalize abortion until birth and now they want to take everyone’s guns because they just care so much about the well-being of children. Sure, totally believable, that’s it. But they are uninteresting and I have nothing to say to them.

But there are plenty of “common people” out there who really do believe, “I just want these one or two new common sense gun controls”. But… you don’t really. Because, say you actually get those one or two new rules. And then something bad happens again (because, whatever new rules you get, I assure you something bad will eventually happen again). At that point, are you going to say, “oh well, we did everything that was reasonable already”. No, you’re going to immediately convince yourself that what is needed is one or two more new rules again, because the technocracy has infected your brain. Continue down that path (which is the path our nation has been walking for years now) and you make your society into a prison (and bad things still happen in prisons, too).

So that is a very practical reason to focus on the deeper culture and stop trying to solve everything with a new program or a new rule. And look, guns are surely less accessible now than they were a hundred years ago, especially on school property. If shootings are a bigger problem now, maybe our focus should not be on the choice of tool.

Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog

Americans have owned guns since the Second Amendment was ratified and before. The average household firearm hasn't gotten much deadlier over the past several decades. And yet only now do we have regular school shootings. What changed? Not the guns. It's the people and the culture

We spent 50 years (or whatever number you prefer) destroying good culture and now we try to sell people back (sometimes literally sell people back) solutions as new programs and policies. Every time I travel I’m struck by the number of billboards I see offering mental health counseling - they are everywhere, we are a mentally ill nation. We culturally break people and then sell them back expert counseling to try to fix them again. Maybe instead we should create a culture that doesn’t break them in the first place.

Grace 🌾 @graceisforyou

This is why the “better policies! more reforms!” take is almost always wrong.

We are bad at living in a national or global community

Two, and I know I’ve said this before, but humans are well-wired to live in small communities, not well-wired to instantly receive information about potentially any bad thing that happens to hundreds of millions or billions of people. It is, of course, perfectly understandable that when many parents hear of something bad happening to other children, and realize that there is a non-zero chance of that happening to their children, they want to do something about it, right now. That’s a very natural response, in a sense I wouldn’t criticize that parental instinct at all. And if your circle of information was a hundred people, that instinct would probably be almost entirely beneficial.

But these days your information circle is much larger. There is a parallel to Ivan Illich’s observation that institutions sort of have an optimal size, and once they get too large they begin to do more harm than good. If you knew only about what was happening in your immediate family… it would probably be helpful to have more information. Knowing about what is happening in a small community, maybe that is the sweet spot. Knowing what is happening to hundreds of millions of people is too much, it makes humans go crazy. (And if I could really feed into your brain every bad thing that was happening to every child on the planet, even with the thought of “so you can protect your child”, you wouldn’t think “it’s great to be so informed!”, you would be paralyzed.)

And we produce new and additional harms when we try to respond to that over-information. In COVID, we saw a disease that was blessedly, remarkably, of very little danger to children - but a very small number of children experienced very serious outcomes from it, and (with those cases emphasized by mass media, for their own reasons) because of that we saw these totally irrational calls to lockdown the lives of children (and New York City is, by the way, still masking three-year-olds because they cannot receive a vaccine that would have an almost unmeasurable effect on their risk from COVID). And so also, for a couple of decades now, because of rare school shootings we have chosen to traumatize children across the country by putting them through lockdown drills which send them the message “you, yes you, could very well die at school!” and which may help plant the idea to do a school shooting in the mind of potential shooters. Our response creates brand new harm which need not be.

The “all or nothing” human mind

And finally, we have to recognize that there are no perfect answers. I won’t link it here, but a couple days ago I saw a very popular Twitter thread that basically made the argument, “good guys with guns can’t stop a shooting, look at these three examples in which good guys with guns were present and the shooting happened anyway”. OK that’s… that’s a terrible argument. How many other proposals would we have to dismiss if the standard is “must work literally 100% of the time or it’s considered a failure”? You may as well take off those seatbelts, folks!

And yet, although some people make such arguments from a place of dishonesty, I also think there is something about the human mind that wants a 100% guarantee. We are good at being all-thinkers and nothing-thinkers, bad at “there is a 60% chance”. I say that even speaking personally as someone who is actually quite good at thinking statistically, yet I still feel this all-or-nothing tug in my own brain. And again, we saw it during COVID, this is why masks had to be talked up as if they were a guarantee you wouldn’t catch COVID. If you had told people who were scared to leave their homes, “wearing this decreases your chance of catching COVID by 50%” (which is ridiculously generous, but play along if you can), all those people would have still been scared to leave their homes! They needed certainty. Certainty was unavailable, but they needed certainty. So, it was strongly implied to them, masks are that certainty.

That is how humans are inclined to think - as I said, I feel that myself. We have to try to do better, which also means recognizing that just about anything proposed is a tradeoff, and there are no perfect solutions.