Welcome to metamodernity - complexity science, meaning making, and the return of spirituality - ePODstemology Metamodernism is the cultural mode that is emerging after postmodernism, and boy do we need it. Postmodernism was a period of deconstruction. A necessary deconstruction, I hasten to say, one that shoo...

epodstemology.buzzsprout.com/1763534/epis...

Metamodernism - culture after the end of history - ePODstemology Timotheus Vermeulen is a full professor of media, culture and society at the University of Oslo in Norway. Together with Robin Van Den Akker, he coined the term metamodernism and kick started scholars...

I did a couple of podcasts about it and its the last chapter of my book. Everything, Everywhere, All At Once was explicitly and very deliberately metamodern.

epodstemology.buzzsprout.com/1763534/epis...

You might like metamodernism. It's characterised by a vacillation between...

On the one hand, cynical postmodern irony directed at absolutist claims, psychopathy, and power.

On the other, sincere and earnest (i.e. emotionally vulnerable) celebrations of things we care about.

The evolved form of this guy:

yeah this guy:

Beyond Happy How to rethink happiness and find fulfilment

There is a summary of the main chapter headings over on my substack here:

profmarkfabian.substack.com/p/coming-soon

The book is not a blogpost - there is a lot in here.

I'm happy to answer questions about this stuff if you don't want to buy the book.

Beyond Happy: How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment Buy Beyond Happy: How to Rethink Happiness and Find Fulfilment by Fabian, Mark (ISBN: 9781835010495) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

I do have a book about this stuff and the centrality of values to human flourishing is its main theme and what distinguishes it from most of the genre:

www.amazon.co.uk/Beyond-Happy...

At a more collective level, solidarity, care, accepting that human connection requires friction, a willingness to take others' burdens upon yourself when able if it promotes healing.

We can all play the social role of the priest if we are mindful of those around us and how we can help each other.

Righteo...

On an individual level, values would be integrity, fallibilism, and being pleasant to hang around with without being a walk over.

A principle would be not taking the easy way when the hard way has more truth to it. Truth can mean many different things here.

Happy for people to take the piss by the way, but I'll just see myself out.

Or even jump in!

There's a lot you can learn about wellness on instagram. I've heard raw milk can trigger a spiritual awakening.

I was about to answer earnestly because I've dedicated my life to this academically and personally but I see all the answers are piss takes so now I'm hesitating.

Like, ummm, what do you want to know? What has brought on this interest?

Kicking You When You're Already Down: The Multipronged Impact of Austerity on Crime The UK Welfare Reform Act 2012 imposed a series of deep welfare cuts, which disproportionately affected ex-ante poorer areas. In this paper, we provide the first evidence of the impact of these auster...

What I did find was evidence that austerity (i.e. benefits cuts and increased deprivation) increases crime rates:

arxiv.org/abs/2012.08133

10 years is life changing and prisons costs around £55 000 per year per prisoner. Imagine if you spent that on social workers and a better policing!

These also aren't "edge cases", nor is 10 years in prison "low cost and easily fixable".

I tried to find reputable data on what percentage of shoplifting and other property crimes is committed by people on benefits, but it doesn't exist. So nobody can be sure.

I am in favour of locking them up!

I am not in favour of *just* locking them up.

Locking them up without reform to the prison and welfare systems is unlikely to substantially reduce these crimes.

This is all I have ever said, since the beginning of this thread. The OP was not an idiot.

Mate this is really depressing.

First you say my comment is unbecoming of an academic.

Then I give you a more academic analysis & you don't want to read it.

Then you ascribed to me ("people like you") a position that I've said at least 6 times that I don't hold.

I'm not your enemy.

So I think you have to lock up shoplifters, especially if they're career criminals. We need more of that.

But you also need prison reform to reduce recidivism.

And you need to think about the environments that drive criminalisation in the first place.

Poverty and psychopathy can both be true.

It's not that individual level behavioural problem aren't real. It's that we *over* emphasises them and *under* emphasise structural factors like the environments of poverty.

There can be psychopaths, and there can be people criminalised by poverty.

Both can be true.

The most common error across all UK public policy is an over-emphasis on individual-level behavioural choices, and wilful blindness to structural determinants of that behaviour.

My undergraduates students turn this up every year in their assessments, so I'm puzzled that policymakers don't get it.

Now the UK doesn't treat anybody humanely, from the poor kids to the juvenile delinquents to the shoplifters to the gangsters. So the problem just compounds, everyone starts to look like a degenerate, and you get calls for lock 'em all up that don't address the pipeline problem.

Reams of evidence on this, but this is one of the more compelling studies, published in the top journal in economics:

www.nber.org/system/files...

Contrast it with the findings from the Three Strikes study above, where punitive US prisons increase criminality.

There are some criminals who cannot be rehabilitated. They are the degenerates. I do not dispute their existence.

But the evidence coming out of the Scandinavian system, which is heavy on rehabilitation and social integration, is that many criminals can be reformed if you treat them humanely.

This is true of the welfare system too, incidentally.

If you just push people into the first available job under duress, they leave that job in faster.

Ultimately, they become a bigger burden on the state.

A job that fits is sustainable, leading to skills and wage growth, higher savings, etc.

C.f. Cottam's work on this www.hilarycottam.com/the-work-we-...

Note that forcing someone to e.g. built furniture in prison as "skills development" is ineffectual & basically modern slavery.

Why? Because you haven't engaged with their motivations, personality, traits, etc. You need to come up with skills/work that fit that person.

The environment continues into the prisons. If you treat their primary function as punitive then you mostly develop hardened criminals - that's part of why they reoffend as soon as they get out. You haven't built them skills, mindset, or a network to structurally change their life.

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Now if you take IronEconomist's view that "most crimes are caused by degenerates so just lock them up" you put it all down to psychology and not to the environmental origins of that psychology.

Policies like Three Strikes and You're Out also just don't work!
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

So on top of degenerate criminals who would go into crime regardless of background (e.g. Epstein), you also have people driven into it by their environment.

You can see this clearly & viscerally in the documentary The Work, which is about group therapy for men in US prisons. Same thing in the UK.

The point is that the environment that confronts poor people from childhood is one of stigmatisation. The system wants to them to fail.

So they say fuck the system.

Origins of drug dependency are often similar - most hard drugs are painkillers. What pain are poor people feeling?

So charity interactions are often further stigmatising because e.g. you go into a bombed out building to visit the food bank and get offered overripe bananas and meat that goes off today.

Of course you ought to take this instead of stealing. That's not the point I'm making.