Thank you! I'm finding that writing about non-political topics is much, much, much more challenging than I expected, so I really appreciate your comment. Surprisingly, I've also found that I enjoy it a great deal more and I care a lot less about politics than I thought. Things that make me go hmmm... 🤔🤔🤔
My understanding of individuality vs collectivism is that of tension, because while we are individuals capable of making our own decisions, we also cannot escape being part of a group. Almost no one can survive in complete isolation, and no one (that I am aware of) has escaped needing someone else to make his own existence possible. At points in history, individualism is valued more than collectivism, and at other times (and the vast majority of the time) collectivism is more valued. I wish I had a little more time to flesh this out, but I was curious what you think about my thesis, that what we’re seeking is that knife-edge balance between individualism and collectivism, and it doesn’t take much to move us off that edge into the extreme of one side or the other, with terrible results either way.
I concur with above: a wonderful essay, and one that is making me ponder a great deal.
I have zero experience of being a member of a good, healthy family, but one consequence of that fact is having studied good families intensely and at length. Every good family that has crossed my path, I've made a nuisance of myself asking questions as well as doing as much observation as possible. And I've noticed that good families allow for individuality and serious differences, and this tension you describe, while it exists, strongly errs on the side of respect for individual autonomy. I know friendship is not the same thing as family, but I think I understand it to some degree. There is almost nothing that my good friend Josh could say or do, almost no choice he could make or position he could espouse, that would make me decide to end our friendship. (This is at least in part because I have complete faith that he would hear me out, thoroughly, and seriously consider my perspective--even if he didn't change his mind. It's the being-heard that matters to me, not the agreement.) We've had very, very vulnerable and intense conversations about very serious disagreements, and still loved each other when the conversation ended, because respecting each other's right to freedom of thought was the highest value. Most of the "dealbreakers" on that very short list would be dealbreakers for the families I've seen, too, so it seems like a reasonable if imperfect comparison.
Great essay! Taking another step away from politics and away from how Red Team v Blue Team dynamics work: I’m thinking the rise of social media has contributed to this need to be part of a collective hive-mind. To be like everyone else you see on your feed, to get the maximum number of ‘likes’, to receive that dopamine rush continually via the lure of the social media siren in the palm of your hand. Thoughts?
Oh, absolutely this is a big part of it. I had a long section on this, but the essay was already pretty long and I cut it in the interest of brevity. As both recent cancellations and newly energetic justifications of cancellations demonstrate, the world of social media is a world that demands conformity and compliance, with brutal punishment in the offing for offenders.
My focus on Substack started with and is centered around people taking personal responsibility for their lives. When I don't write, I feel depressed. There's something about writing about taking personal responsibility that feels like a "reason to live" or gives me meaning.
I realize that people being "collective" and not taking or expecting personal responsibility (for themselves or others) is THE main problem with our world today. It's mostly projection of issues that people are not dealing with it, and it's WHY people hurt others (to try to "save" them).
Maybe in another time period in history, this would not be THE most important issue. But I think for this time period, it actually is.
Yes. I think you are right about this. It's a notion that both scared and angered me for awhile, but lately the more I think about it, the more I find it empowering and freeing and even exciting.
When you give the responsibility to take care of you to another person, you become a slave to whether that person does it or not. This is why taking that personal responsibility back is empowering and freeing. You no longer have to wait around for the world to change to get your needs met and explore your actual desires. Think of how much time is wasted by people playing "victim" complaining about things rather that putting in work to figure out how they can get those things via another way. We as a society are wasting time and energy on pointless things and hurting ourselves in the process.
“When you give the responsibility to take care of you to another person, you become a slave to whether that person does it or not. This is why taking that personal responsibility back is empowering and freeing.”
This should be written on everyone’s bathroom mirror so they’re reminded of it every morning.
Abby & Britanny were (are) college friends of my younger son. I have met them several times and they are very well adjusted ladies given thier lot in life. It is impossible not to do a double take of course when you see them, but they are gracious and understanding about the gawkers.
Wow! What an amazing coincidence. I'm very pleased to learn that my impressions, from having read and watched everything I could find about them, were accurate.
I've been grappling with the issue of the difference (or whether there even IS a difference) between ideology and religion for several years now. I left my own religion last year (traditional Catholicism, which if not exactly a cult, at least had a lot of cultish tendencies) and have been shocked and humbled by how much my practice of it had distorted my thinking as I go about the business of figuring out what I really believe. Maybe not everyone is distorted this way. I don't know. It's a mistake I don't intend to make again.
I said it before, but it's essays like this that are the reason I'm a paid subscriber. I love your writing (which you underrate, BTW) because I never know where it will take me. The majority write their takes on whatever the current big thing in news is, but you always surprise and delight me, even when the subject or your conclusions are dark. This is worth much more than the cost of my annual subscription.
Thank you so much! I grew up in a cultish version of evangelical Christianity, so I understand this struggle. I still have to root certain notions out of my head more fully, among them that these are the “end times” and many things don’t matter because the world is about to end anyway.
I was raised conservative evangelical and also grew up on the Rapture. I'm older than you - a Cold War kid like your friend Josh- so for me the End Times were strongly flavored by fears of the Soviets, which now seems quaint. When I converted to Catholicism, I thought I had escaped that particular trauma, but then I got sucked into the traditionalist camp and their own horrifying eschatology (Three Days of Darkness, anyone). I'm just seeing how much this sort of preoccupation cripples you when you're trying to figure out how you should act in the world. Not to mention the near-paralyzing fear of growing up with these sorts of beliefs.
A very impressive work, and as usual, you've given me a lot to think about. I've not read any of the autobiographies by North Korean defectors, so your disclosures were new to me. And equally chilling. The Internet excels at logging every mistake and indiscretion, to be mined when needed to discredit virtually anyone.
Thank you for this thoughtful, and I think heartfelt, essay Holly. The way in which you thought through your experience of learning about conjoined twins, and this set of twins in particular, is something I will return to over and over again.
“if you’re equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.” I have to disagree with this, at least with respect to the physical world. I am a research scientist who has at times been the leading world expert in several, admittedly narrow, technical areas. Quite routinely at the frontier of my research I could not predict the outcome of experiments. That's why they were scientifically interesting. However, I could typically predict it could be A or B and have a detailed explanation for why A was the correct explanation or B was. [The coolest was when unprectable outcome C happened...]
So I was equally could at predicting either outcome despite, and possibly because (?), I had the best knowledge available at the time. Since people aren't machines and are much, much more chaotic than molecules, then they are going to be even harder to predict no matter how well we know them. Thank God or life would be so boring!
As a reader, I find disclaimers meant to cover extremely unusual outlier situations to be annoying and insulting. Just as I can write about sex differences and note that men are stronger than women without needing to disclaimer that akchually there are female body builders who can bench-press more than the average man, I don't feel the need to disclaimer that I'm not talking about leading world experts in narrow, technical areas. I have to trust readers to know that, not being a retarded third grader--but in fact, a statistician--I am aware that outliers exist.
Sorry, That wasn't my point at all. I loved your take. I have just found that as I've grown more knowledgeable about people (ASD starting point) I've found I have, at a certain level, I can better explain, to myself at least, why they would say or believe either A or B...
I don’t know if you followed Data’s life trajectory after Deep Space. He spends a lot of time cancelling people on Twitter and his preferred pronoun is “they”.
This is not the topic of article at all and you don’t have to be an information source but how do their brains go about dividing up the non personality tasks? Do they have two parasympathetic nervous systems /paleomamalian cortexes that work together? Does one of those systems in one of the brains essentially die and let the other take over?
They have two nervous systems, and they’ve discussed times when one was scared and the other wasn’t, so I suspect they have differing adrenaline responses. There is an anecdote in the LIFE article of one of them sneezing and the other covering the sneezing sister’s mouth with her hand, seemingly as a reflex, but that could as easily be unconsciously picking up the signs of an ongoing sneeze as a shared awareness. I’m not sure of much beyond that, and they’ve always been too busy leading normal lives to volunteer for unnecessary testing.
I feel like the only real testing that could be done about the "deep" nervous system would have to me done by Josef Mengele and supervised by Socrates.
I am by no means through. I love the first half you wrote. We both have something in common. We picked topics of interest when we were young and researched it. I had people I researched. For me it was Stephen Hawking and his illness ALS, a few German celebrities, and then schizophrenia. I just got obsessed with learning more and more.
It was so ironic when my mom called me 5 years ago and told me she was diagnosed with ALS and I knew exactly what it meant. Exactly.
Your deep dive into your topics of interest and the conclusion is always so fascinating to read. Keep it up. Here I really believe individualism in the US is fading. In Germany people think and act much more conform and always have, but now I feel the US is catching up to conformism in a very negative way.
Another classic essay! On current evidence I think I can safely say I prefer your new direction in writing to the old one.
Thank you! I'm finding that writing about non-political topics is much, much, much more challenging than I expected, so I really appreciate your comment. Surprisingly, I've also found that I enjoy it a great deal more and I care a lot less about politics than I thought. Things that make me go hmmm... 🤔🤔🤔
My understanding of individuality vs collectivism is that of tension, because while we are individuals capable of making our own decisions, we also cannot escape being part of a group. Almost no one can survive in complete isolation, and no one (that I am aware of) has escaped needing someone else to make his own existence possible. At points in history, individualism is valued more than collectivism, and at other times (and the vast majority of the time) collectivism is more valued. I wish I had a little more time to flesh this out, but I was curious what you think about my thesis, that what we’re seeking is that knife-edge balance between individualism and collectivism, and it doesn’t take much to move us off that edge into the extreme of one side or the other, with terrible results either way.
I concur with above: a wonderful essay, and one that is making me ponder a great deal.
I have zero experience of being a member of a good, healthy family, but one consequence of that fact is having studied good families intensely and at length. Every good family that has crossed my path, I've made a nuisance of myself asking questions as well as doing as much observation as possible. And I've noticed that good families allow for individuality and serious differences, and this tension you describe, while it exists, strongly errs on the side of respect for individual autonomy. I know friendship is not the same thing as family, but I think I understand it to some degree. There is almost nothing that my good friend Josh could say or do, almost no choice he could make or position he could espouse, that would make me decide to end our friendship. (This is at least in part because I have complete faith that he would hear me out, thoroughly, and seriously consider my perspective--even if he didn't change his mind. It's the being-heard that matters to me, not the agreement.) We've had very, very vulnerable and intense conversations about very serious disagreements, and still loved each other when the conversation ended, because respecting each other's right to freedom of thought was the highest value. Most of the "dealbreakers" on that very short list would be dealbreakers for the families I've seen, too, so it seems like a reasonable if imperfect comparison.
Great essay! Taking another step away from politics and away from how Red Team v Blue Team dynamics work: I’m thinking the rise of social media has contributed to this need to be part of a collective hive-mind. To be like everyone else you see on your feed, to get the maximum number of ‘likes’, to receive that dopamine rush continually via the lure of the social media siren in the palm of your hand. Thoughts?
Oh, absolutely this is a big part of it. I had a long section on this, but the essay was already pretty long and I cut it in the interest of brevity. As both recent cancellations and newly energetic justifications of cancellations demonstrate, the world of social media is a world that demands conformity and compliance, with brutal punishment in the offing for offenders.
My focus on Substack started with and is centered around people taking personal responsibility for their lives. When I don't write, I feel depressed. There's something about writing about taking personal responsibility that feels like a "reason to live" or gives me meaning.
I realize that people being "collective" and not taking or expecting personal responsibility (for themselves or others) is THE main problem with our world today. It's mostly projection of issues that people are not dealing with it, and it's WHY people hurt others (to try to "save" them).
Maybe in another time period in history, this would not be THE most important issue. But I think for this time period, it actually is.
Yes. I think you are right about this. It's a notion that both scared and angered me for awhile, but lately the more I think about it, the more I find it empowering and freeing and even exciting.
When you give the responsibility to take care of you to another person, you become a slave to whether that person does it or not. This is why taking that personal responsibility back is empowering and freeing. You no longer have to wait around for the world to change to get your needs met and explore your actual desires. Think of how much time is wasted by people playing "victim" complaining about things rather that putting in work to figure out how they can get those things via another way. We as a society are wasting time and energy on pointless things and hurting ourselves in the process.
“When you give the responsibility to take care of you to another person, you become a slave to whether that person does it or not. This is why taking that personal responsibility back is empowering and freeing.”
This should be written on everyone’s bathroom mirror so they’re reminded of it every morning.
Abby & Britanny were (are) college friends of my younger son. I have met them several times and they are very well adjusted ladies given thier lot in life. It is impossible not to do a double take of course when you see them, but they are gracious and understanding about the gawkers.
Wow! What an amazing coincidence. I'm very pleased to learn that my impressions, from having read and watched everything I could find about them, were accurate.
I've been grappling with the issue of the difference (or whether there even IS a difference) between ideology and religion for several years now. I left my own religion last year (traditional Catholicism, which if not exactly a cult, at least had a lot of cultish tendencies) and have been shocked and humbled by how much my practice of it had distorted my thinking as I go about the business of figuring out what I really believe. Maybe not everyone is distorted this way. I don't know. It's a mistake I don't intend to make again.
I said it before, but it's essays like this that are the reason I'm a paid subscriber. I love your writing (which you underrate, BTW) because I never know where it will take me. The majority write their takes on whatever the current big thing in news is, but you always surprise and delight me, even when the subject or your conclusions are dark. This is worth much more than the cost of my annual subscription.
Thank you so much! I grew up in a cultish version of evangelical Christianity, so I understand this struggle. I still have to root certain notions out of my head more fully, among them that these are the “end times” and many things don’t matter because the world is about to end anyway.
I was raised conservative evangelical and also grew up on the Rapture. I'm older than you - a Cold War kid like your friend Josh- so for me the End Times were strongly flavored by fears of the Soviets, which now seems quaint. When I converted to Catholicism, I thought I had escaped that particular trauma, but then I got sucked into the traditionalist camp and their own horrifying eschatology (Three Days of Darkness, anyone). I'm just seeing how much this sort of preoccupation cripples you when you're trying to figure out how you should act in the world. Not to mention the near-paralyzing fear of growing up with these sorts of beliefs.
A very impressive work, and as usual, you've given me a lot to think about. I've not read any of the autobiographies by North Korean defectors, so your disclosures were new to me. And equally chilling. The Internet excels at logging every mistake and indiscretion, to be mined when needed to discredit virtually anyone.
Thanks! I reviewed one of the North Korean defector memoirs here: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/a-clear-and-present-danger
Thank you for this thoughtful, and I think heartfelt, essay Holly. The way in which you thought through your experience of learning about conjoined twins, and this set of twins in particular, is something I will return to over and over again.
Lovely piece!
Wonderful. You've explored a topic in a way I never would have predicted and made fascinating connections.
“if you’re equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.” I have to disagree with this, at least with respect to the physical world. I am a research scientist who has at times been the leading world expert in several, admittedly narrow, technical areas. Quite routinely at the frontier of my research I could not predict the outcome of experiments. That's why they were scientifically interesting. However, I could typically predict it could be A or B and have a detailed explanation for why A was the correct explanation or B was. [The coolest was when unprectable outcome C happened...]
So I was equally could at predicting either outcome despite, and possibly because (?), I had the best knowledge available at the time. Since people aren't machines and are much, much more chaotic than molecules, then they are going to be even harder to predict no matter how well we know them. Thank God or life would be so boring!
As a reader, I find disclaimers meant to cover extremely unusual outlier situations to be annoying and insulting. Just as I can write about sex differences and note that men are stronger than women without needing to disclaimer that akchually there are female body builders who can bench-press more than the average man, I don't feel the need to disclaimer that I'm not talking about leading world experts in narrow, technical areas. I have to trust readers to know that, not being a retarded third grader--but in fact, a statistician--I am aware that outliers exist.
Sorry, That wasn't my point at all. I loved your take. I have just found that as I've grown more knowledgeable about people (ASD starting point) I've found I have, at a certain level, I can better explain, to myself at least, why they would say or believe either A or B...
I don’t know if you followed Data’s life trajectory after Deep Space. He spends a lot of time cancelling people on Twitter and his preferred pronoun is “they”.
This is not the topic of article at all and you don’t have to be an information source but how do their brains go about dividing up the non personality tasks? Do they have two parasympathetic nervous systems /paleomamalian cortexes that work together? Does one of those systems in one of the brains essentially die and let the other take over?
Both seem impossible.
They have two nervous systems, and they’ve discussed times when one was scared and the other wasn’t, so I suspect they have differing adrenaline responses. There is an anecdote in the LIFE article of one of them sneezing and the other covering the sneezing sister’s mouth with her hand, seemingly as a reflex, but that could as easily be unconsciously picking up the signs of an ongoing sneeze as a shared awareness. I’m not sure of much beyond that, and they’ve always been too busy leading normal lives to volunteer for unnecessary testing.
I feel like the only real testing that could be done about the "deep" nervous system would have to me done by Josef Mengele and supervised by Socrates.
Holly this is a magnum opus. I’m changed by having read this. Bravo!
In a way, I would say you haven’t moved on from writing about politics; you’re just writing about it at the kernel level rather than the GUI
Great read
I am by no means through. I love the first half you wrote. We both have something in common. We picked topics of interest when we were young and researched it. I had people I researched. For me it was Stephen Hawking and his illness ALS, a few German celebrities, and then schizophrenia. I just got obsessed with learning more and more.
It was so ironic when my mom called me 5 years ago and told me she was diagnosed with ALS and I knew exactly what it meant. Exactly.
Your deep dive into your topics of interest and the conclusion is always so fascinating to read. Keep it up. Here I really believe individualism in the US is fading. In Germany people think and act much more conform and always have, but now I feel the US is catching up to conformism in a very negative way.
Thank you!!!