You ever try to code switch at work and fail? 😂

Cooperation, competition and multi-level selection | 2 | A new paradig The concept of society as an organism has a venerable history but it has been eclipsed during the last half-century by various forms of individualism –

I understand. What I am doing is deliberately putting it out there that other cultures are products of different environmental pressures, and that those pressures have been restructured by a particular institutional design in an adaptive manner that lead to group functional outcomes.

Yes, time, place, people and questions of degrees always stands. 😀

2/2
The second is about absolute presence. Collapsing the first into the second is the move the thread is describing. It happens a lot, and noticing it in oneself is the beginning of self-observation and clear thinking.

P.S. A quick reading note! "Structurally not elevated" and "not elevated" are different claims. The first is about how different institutional structures produce large differences in the rate at which antisocial people reach power, how far they rise, and how long they last. 1/2

9/9
The defensive hostility of ordinary Americans toward comparative evidence is part of the same system. The structure survives because its subjects have been conditioned to treat its critique as an attack. Pointing this out isn't blaming individuals. It's asking you to look at the structure.

8/ In a network-age information environment, a structure optimized for slow deliberation at the top becomes a structure optimized for capture by whoever moves fastest and cares least about norms. The sociopath advantage isn't a bug in Trumpism. We cannot run a modern nation on 18th century hardware.

7/ The reflex to dismiss comparative evidence with affect is maladaptive. Nordic institutions were built and reformed since 1634, evolving explicitly by looking at what worked elsewhere and adopting it. Comparative thinking is institutionalized. In the US it is coded as disloyalty.

6/ This is what you see when Americans respond to comparative institutional claims with "they have problems too" or "big lol". The hostility isn't random. It's the structure using its subjects to preserve itself from external evolutionary pressures to adapt. New ideas must be eliminated.

5/ Imperial structures condition their subjects to defend them. Not through conscious loyalty — through structural reflex. When the structure cannot survive honest comparative examination, the people inside it learn to flatten comparisons into mood, to dismiss evidence with affect and performance.

4/ The measurable gap isn't "somewhat better at the moment." It's decades-long and cross-metric: corruption indices, regulatory capture, elite impunity, child poverty, life expectancy, social mobility, inequality, incarceration rates, electoral participation. Structural, not episodic.

3/ Every democracy that came later evolved. Parliamentary systems, Ombudsman offices, proportional representation, independent anti-corruption authorities, constitutional courts with teeth, transparency defaults, codetermination, federal dispersal of executive power. Adapt or die.

2/ The US Constitution designed in 1787 for an agrarian republic of 4 mil, with information at the speed of a horse and power held by landholding men who knew each other personally. It is 18th century imperial-administrative hardware. We are asking it to govern a 340 million-person network society.

1/ Following up on my post about why antisocial people get structurally elevated in the US but not in Scandinavia or Germany. The replies to that post are themselves data. Worth looking at how an 18th century imperial structure conditions the people living inside it to defend it.

This is a fallacy of degree — treating a claim about rate and prevalence as if it's a claim about absolute presence! Every society produces antisocial people. The comparative question is how often they are elevated and how long they stay there, and on that the institutional records differ massively.

That is what antisocial people do. Why is it that antisocial people are structurally elevated in the US but not in structures such as those in Scandinavia and Germany for example? We know why and that should be the central discussion in the US today and every day until we get fundamental reforms.

7/7
The American system has taken a real but narrow institutional interest and stretched it into something that functions, as you describe, as a tool of personal control. It is fundamentally illiberal and patriarchal.

6/
Personal mistreatment by a judge isn't a deliberation. Under the Swedish framework a clerk could speak to a therapist, a journalist, or both, and the employer trying to identify her would itself be the violation.

5/
The difference is that in Sweden, a narrow justification produces a narrow rule rather than a general-purpose silencing tool!

4/ Deliberations among judges are protected. That narrow core tracks your final point; preserving the Opinion of the Court as the Opinion. The Swedish justification for överläggningssekretess* is almost identical.

3/ Alongside this sits *meddelarfrihet* — freedom to communicate information to the press — and *efterforskningsförbud*, which forbids the authority from investigating the source. A public employee has a constitutional right to furnish information to a journalist for publication.

2/ Each category of secrecy requires statutory authorization, a defined scope, and usually a time limit. A citizen can walk into a court registry, request the diarium, and receive non-exempt documents promptly, with a written, appealable decision if anything is withheld.

1/ Worth drawing the comparison to Sweden here, because the default runs the other way. The Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 — one of four fundamental constitutional laws — establishes *offentlighetsprincipen*: documents held by public authorities are public. Secrecy is the exception.

Nails it. You are hitting the core of why the Constitution is a document designed to protect assets and the powerful, not the people, Secrecy is a feature of the Constitution.

In my culture we see glibness, cynicism, pessimism and sarcasm as mental health issues.

Who trained the GOP? The GRU did.

Scandinavian fjord culture.

As an immigrant from a fiercely egalitarian culture, I see the structure and the reason it has not been reformed by the people as quite obvious; the structure has made those willing to play the game as designed by Hamilton, not just fabulously wealthy, but safe from democratic asset redistribution.

Not the Yoo version, agreed. But he Founders were 18th-c elites, explicitly anti-democratic, with no working model of democracy or parliamentary confidence. They built what they knew. The maximalist reading is what that structure permits once norms fail. Reform means building what they couldn't.