Based Camp - The Tocqueville Paradox： Why Does Discontent Rise as Societal Conditions Improve？

00:00:00.000 As our society has become a more cush, easier to live in, the expectations around comfort within life, around lack of challenges within life, have risen at a rate much faster than we have actually been able to meet them.

00:00:17.900 Yeah, I can't begin to emphasize how spot on this is because I love watching, for example, vintage cooking videos.

00:00:23.900 And so here I'm going to move further with some actual data on this paradox because it's been studied in real world environments.

00:00:32.500 Would you like to know more?

00:00:34.340 Hello, Simone. I'm excited to be here with you today.

00:00:36.980 Today we are going to be talking about the Tocqueville paradox, which is really interesting and related to a lot of the concepts that we discuss on this show.

00:00:48.140 Interesting.

00:00:48.660 So just as a summary, I'll start with a brief explanation of what it is, and we can go over some of the data on it, all right?

00:00:55.420 Okay.

00:00:56.640 The Tocqueville paradox describes a phenomenon where, as the overall quality of life and social conditions improve a society, people's expectations rise at a faster rate, leading to increased discontent and frustration.

00:01:10.220 In other words, as things get better, people tend to focus on what they don't have rather than appreciating the improvement they have experienced.

00:01:19.200 This paradox suggests that there is a gap between the actual improvements in living conditions and people's perceptions of their lives.

00:01:26.720 As societies become more prosperous and egalitarian, people's expectations for their personal lives and the overall quality of society increase.

00:01:35.620 However, these expectations often rise faster than the actual rate of improvement, leading to a sense of relative deprivation and dissatisfaction, even though the absolute quality of life has improved.

00:01:46.380 Now, for those people listening to our podcast, like me, who have fuzzy memories of American history, do I have it right that Alexis de Tocqueville is the person who inspired this paradox and that he was the one who essentially first started talking about American status anxiety, writing about his experiences traveling through America as a man from France,

00:02:11.500 and seeing things like buildings with false facades that are really just normal squat buildings, but that have those old west town two-story facades that look really fancy.

00:02:22.740 And just that being indicative of many other examples and observations he made about Americans' obsession with showing and signaling material wealth.

00:02:31.740 Is that the Alexis de Tocqueville we're talking about?

00:02:33.920 That's the one that we're talking about here.

00:02:35.640 Alrighty.

00:02:36.440 Yeah, you know, this is really interesting.

00:02:37.600 I was just listening to another YouTuber's overview of Joseph Smith, the guy who started the LDS Church, talking about how at the turn of the American Revolution, you know, around the time that Alexis de Tocqueville was traveling around the United States, only around 10% of Americans in this newly formed United States attended church regularly.

00:02:58.660 Really? So this was a largely godless society. And while I think a lot of the historical education that we got as kids was about the historical revivals and about these creation, you know, like the creation of the LDS Church, for example, you know, these religious zealots and their advocacy and work, what was not being discussed with the largely godless society.

00:03:19.720 Well, it's because it was for two reasons. It was, one, because these individuals wrote a lot more.

00:03:25.480 Yeah.

00:03:25.680 It's very similar to how if you're studying European history, you're going to get a lot of history from the Roman perspective and very little from the, you know, Gallic perspective.

00:03:34.060 Right. And people are talking about the Dark Ages when really those ages weren't so dark. It was just, they weren't the word cell ages. They weren't the substack ages.

00:03:41.800 Yeah. And that was the problem. And so what I was thinking about though, and just the thought I'll end with before you continue is what I didn't realize around about this period in American history is, is it is oddly similar to our period now with largely non-religious people and also quite materialistic people. And that's why this paradox then and now are quite relevant. Right. 0.50

00:04:06.500 Yeah. Well, I don't know if, I don't know if I would say that the religiosity aspect, I think it's an interesting thing to bring up, but I don't know if it's directly relevant to this particular paradox because while religiosity does correlate with gratitude for what one has in life, I don't, like, I guess there's like a tangential connection, but I don't see it as a particularly large connection.

00:04:30.280 However, I do think that the point that you just made is an incredibly important point to elevate is that we have a misconception of rates of religiosity in certain historic time periods within America as being much higher.

00:04:43.140 Now we should know that these individuals believed in God, like the average person would have identified with some religious sect and they would have believed in God, but they wouldn't have, it might not have been like the focus of their lives in a academic sense.

00:04:58.460 Right. Well, and just because you don't regularly attend church doesn't mean you don't believe in God, but I would also argue, and this shows up in anthropological research on people's religious beliefs as well, that if you aren't regularly practicing your faith, you really aren't living it. You're not living those values. You're not digging into it. You don't have that faith. You have to, it's, it's something you have to constantly lean into and remind yourself of if you actually are going to not only.

00:05:24.380 Yeah, but I think that that can be achieved through a separate mechanism. Specifically, I think that that can be achieved through a few things more effectively than church attendance.

00:05:34.060 Yeah, sure.

00:05:34.560 We're just talking about like crafting a religious system or practicing a religious system. One is some form of regular sacrifice that you're making actively as part of your religion, specifically a sacrifice that differentiates you from other people around you. And this can include unique styles of dress, unique names, and unique ways of acting. Anything where you are consciously differentiating yourself from those around you will be even more effective than church attendance.

00:06:01.580 Yeah. Well, and I think this is why people start comparing things like CrossFit and other exercise regimens to a cult or a religion because they start to behave in many ways like religions and cults.

00:06:14.120 What the Tocqueville paradox is really focused on, if I'm going to word it in my own words, Simone, is people in our current society misunderstand how good they have it in a historic context.

00:06:27.220 And as our society has become more cush, easier to live in, the expectations around comfort within life, around lack of challenges within life have risen at a rate out of like much faster than we have actually been able to meet them by realistically solving our ancestors' needs.

00:06:52.740 Yeah, I can't begin to emphasize how spot on this is because I love watching, for example, vintage cooking videos about like, oh, here are some treats that you as a vintage housewife could cook to really impress your neighbors and husband and family. 0.95

00:07:06.000 And they are shit looking meals. They look disgusting. I compare that to what I see when scrolling on Instagram now. 0.99

00:07:12.780 I'm just like, this is what I casually threw together as a working mom. And they are insane.

00:07:17.940 So in the 1910s, they had a simple roast beef and Franconia potatoes. The 1920s was chicken a la king, which is just chicken and vegetables in a cream sauce over rice.

00:07:28.540 In the 1930s, they had cream chip beef, buttered peas and white bread. Yum.

00:07:33.760 In the 1940s, they ate fried spam, a baked potato and lima beans. Even better.

00:07:39.280 The 1950s was the decade of the TV dinner featuring roast turkey with gravy, mashed potatoes and peas.

00:07:45.620 I really wish for people who haven't studied like culinary history, I could emphasize just how bland and tasteless food was as recently as something like the 1950s.

00:07:57.800 I mean, I think people are vaguely aware that humans fought wars. People died over spices that now we take completely for granted.

00:08:07.240 But if you look even as recently as like the 1950s in the US, what you would have been eating at a nice dinner would have been, you know, steak and potatoes.

00:08:16.960 And so that would have been steak, maybe seasoned with salt and pepper and potatoes, maybe seasoned with salt and pepper.

00:08:24.260 And when you think about the diversity of food we have today, whether it's being able to go out and have Japanese food or Thai food or Indian food or even a modern nice juicy steak that's well seasoned.

00:08:36.780 You can look at pictures of steaks from this period on dinner tables and you can just tell that they are tough and bland and nightmarish.

00:08:45.580 Yeah, standards. It's kind of like the Olympics, you know, how people have been, you know, the summer Olympics, it just took place.

00:08:52.840 And so people have been posting a lot of side by sides of like, this was like the 1930s Olympics tumbling regime.

00:08:59.040 And it's someone like doing a cartwheel and looking really proud of themselves.

00:09:01.720 And then it's like, and this is, you know, in 2024, it's someone like defying gravity and not being human anymore.

00:09:15.580 The quote that we always do from the martyrdom of man that I think encapsulates the Tocqueville paradox very well is and helps, I think, people who read this text regularly reflect and build gratitude for where they are today is this was a text that was written in the mid 1800s.

00:09:42.980 So the people of that time period lived horrible lives.

00:09:46.760 Oh, yeah. No surgery, very little pain management aside from maybe alcohol and opium.

00:09:52.280 And yeah, rampant diseases everywhere.

00:09:55.420 You know, that was that was the Spanish flu around that time.

00:09:58.080 Oh, that was around 1915, 1916, right?

00:10:00.660 Oh, yeah. So it hadn't even happened yet.

00:10:02.220 Yeah.

00:10:02.580 I didn't post some horrors that were happening in this time period and what it would have been like.

00:10:06.820 To give you an idea of just how bad things were when this was written.

00:10:10.060 If you were in the United States, around 30% of births would have ended in the death of the child.

00:10:15.840 If somebody was doing surgery on you, it would have been done without anesthesia.

00:10:19.400 This was about 40 years before The Jungle was written, which described things like in America's industrial capacity, beleaguered and underpaid workers falling into sausage vats and that sausage being sold being a regular thing that happened.

00:10:36.800 If you got cut or something, you were likely to die due to infections.

00:10:42.240 For example, you get appendicitis, you die.

00:10:45.040 You get a compound fracture, 50% survival rate.

00:10:47.820 Diseases like diabetes, heart disease, yeah, you die.

00:10:52.140 You get depression, you get locked up in a mental asylum.

00:10:56.200 Dental problems? 0.88

00:10:57.300 Your teeth just rot out of your head.

00:10:59.420 Don't worry about the pain.

00:11:00.500 In fact, during this period, women lost on average one tooth for every one child they had. 0.64

00:11:06.520 And if you're looking at a place like the United States, they would have been having seven children on average.

00:11:11.400 So keep in mind, that means for every woman not getting married, some other woman was having 14 kids. 0.99

00:11:16.680 But a guy writing in this time period, trying to build gratitude for his own people, right, was saying, and as for ourselves, if we are sometimes inclined to regret that our lot is cast in these unhappy days, let us remember how much more fortunate we are than those who lived before us a few centuries ago.

00:11:35.380 The working man enjoys more luxuries today than did the king of England in Anglo-Saxon times, and at his command are intellectual delights, which, but a little while ago, the most learned in the land could not obtain.

00:11:48.040 All this we owe to the labors of other men.

00:11:50.820 Let us therefore remember them with gratitude.

00:11:53.080 Let us follow their glorious example by adding something new to the knowledge of mankind.

00:11:58.580 Let us pay to the future the debt which we owe the past.

00:12:01.760 And so what he's, you know, remarking on here is even back in the 1850s, you know, they had a lot to be grateful for, yet they had already forgotten it, just like people today don't realize.

00:12:17.260 He's saying our lives today are better than the lives of the people, you know.

00:12:22.080 Several hundred years before.

00:12:23.560 And now we're a couple hundred years from then.

00:12:25.280 And this is important, I think, for general mental health to read history.

00:12:30.860 Even recent history.

00:12:32.880 Like, expectations.

00:12:34.960 When you talk with young people about the things that give them despair in life, right?

00:12:41.300 Yes.

00:12:41.960 Talking about how hard their lives are, you will often get statements like, well, you know, I can't have the phone I want.

00:12:53.280 You know, I'm stuck using technology.

00:12:55.380 I'll never be able to own a home.

00:12:57.380 I'll never be able to own a home.

00:13:00.300 You know, and then you point out, it's like, well, you know, historically, most Americans lived with their parents, if you go a couple hundred years ago.

00:13:07.240 And they're like, oh, I was unaware of this.

00:13:10.140 When they got married, they did.

00:13:11.600 I think it was even up until like the early 1900s, it was, I think, 36% of people when they got married were still living with their parents.

00:13:17.480 Or, you know, like, if you look at cell phone rates among, for example, among homeless Americans, and I'll add the exact number in post.

00:13:24.540 It's 76%.

00:13:25.940 It's really high.

00:13:27.200 If you look at, in poverty line American households now, if you look at refrigeration, refrigerator owner rates, really high.

00:13:35.900 It's 99.9%.

00:13:38.480 And I think people misunderstand how much of a revolution the refrigerator was in terms of quality of life.

00:13:44.620 When my grandmother got a refrigerator, how stoked was she? 1.00

00:13:47.840 Yes.

00:13:48.560 Yeah.

00:13:48.800 Or how recent it was.

00:13:51.840 So when you're looking at 1950s stuff and you're seeing things like, you know, like those fruit Jell-O mold things that people would give to the natives and stuff?

00:14:01.120 Yes.

00:14:01.500 That was popular.

00:14:03.120 The height of gastronomic enjoyment.

00:14:06.180 Yes.

00:14:07.040 Predominantly to show off that you owned a refrigerator.

00:14:10.100 Oh, really?

00:14:10.700 That was, oh, oh, how intriguing.

00:14:12.720 I did not know.

00:14:13.140 It could only be made with a refrigerator and not only owned a refrigerator.

00:14:16.660 And so it was a way to be like, look at my refrigerator.

00:14:20.060 I have fancy things.

00:14:22.100 And even in my dad's generation, I mean, if you talk about something like television, they were the first ones on their block to get a TV.

00:14:27.780 And all the other kids would come.

00:14:28.860 Now contrast that with today, where 76% of Americans living in poverty have a television in their household.

00:14:36.060 I feel young Americans don't understand just how grueling things were without a screen.

00:14:41.020 I grew up in the generation where every weekend we would drive two and a half hours to the family farm.

00:14:47.740 And in that ride in the car, because I'd get carsick if I tried to read, you just had to sit there and stare.

00:14:54.180 You didn't have, you may have like a music track that you could listen to if the rest of the family would agree to it.

00:15:02.140 But other than that, there was nothing.

00:15:05.420 It was often the same as plane flights.

00:15:07.420 You know, you're stuck on that plane for four hours just staring at the seat in front of you.

00:15:11.120 It is almost hard to convey to somebody who grew up with cell phones, with screens, just how dreadfully boring the world was before them.

00:15:20.400 I just realized is when you give someone sourdough bread, because it shows you have and can maintain a sourdough starter, which is a big flex because it takes a lot of time.

00:15:28.180 Yeah, so we've got little flexes like this today.

00:15:33.840 But interestingly, the core flexes that I think people engage in today, which shows, I think, a true post-scarcity world, is stuff like you giving out eggs from our backdoor chicken coop and stuff like that.

00:15:45.080 Okay, that's my fault.

00:15:46.040 Or sourdough bread or something that, you know, you cooked and made at home.

00:15:50.600 They're flexes which demonstrate that you don't need to rely on the industrialized economy, yet we cannot forget how much easier the industrialized economy has made our lives.

00:16:01.460 And here I'll add some stats about absolute poverty rates in places like the United States as well as starvation rates.

00:16:06.980 So if we're looking at poverty rates in the United States, in the early 1900s, poverty was extremely widespread, affecting between 40% and 60% of Americans.

00:16:16.900 If you go to the 1960s, it was already down to only 22.4% of Americans.

00:16:23.200 If you go to modern times, like 2012, only 9.1% of Americans lived in poverty.

00:16:29.740 And while starvation rates are surprisingly hard to find, we do know that by the 1940s, approximately 25% of military draftees showed evidence of severe malnutrition, i.e. they were starving.

00:16:42.980 Because I think people don't realize, like they just don't realize how many people used to starve or die of exposure.

00:16:49.880 We were recently on the Jim Rutt Show, and you were talking about, like, he's like, oh, it doesn't really matter if we do a jubilee or we have some level of economic collapse.

00:16:57.740 And you were pointing out, well, he's like, well, it wouldn't be so bad if, you know, like old people just had to move back in with their kids. 1.00

00:17:03.760 And I'm like, hold on.

00:17:05.240 You're like, one, a lot of them won't have kids to move back in with at this point.

00:17:09.140 And two, if you look at the Americans right now who are living on social services, they have a huge amount.

00:17:16.780 It's something like 80% of them live paycheck to paycheck, which means if they lost their social services, which often make up around 60% of their daily expenses,

00:17:25.240 including things like food, housing, medical care, child care, they're literally starving.

00:17:32.120 Well, and as it stands, these people do not have the ability to handle an unexpected $1,000 expense out of nowhere.

00:17:40.080 And then suddenly, way more than $1,000 in routine, monthly, basic survival expenses.

00:17:47.060 Yeah, so when he's like, oh, it doesn't matter if these systems collapse, because in the 1900s, we didn't have these systems.

00:17:54.840 It's like, in the 1900s, people starved to death regularly.

00:17:58.540 Yeah, I was just listening to Planet Money did a little thing on the Great Depression, that podcast by NPR, and they were reading a first account from someone about their experience just seeing whole families out on the street with their babies, all of their possessions, like newborn babies, because they could no longer pay for rent.

00:18:20.940 They lost absolutely everything, and just couldn't, there was absolutely nothing for them.

00:18:26.440 The government had absolutely no way to support them.

00:18:29.520 You can bet a lot of people died, and a lot of very, you know, helpless children and babies, which I, we're not, we're going to move on quickly, because I cannot think about this, change of the subject.

00:18:38.840 Okay, let's go, let's go, let's go.

00:18:40.580 Yeah, it's, it's the situation, we can go back to earlier economic system types.

00:18:46.380 Right, but we have to set up the social infrastructure for that. 0.99

00:18:49.900 For example, churches used to have the social infrastructure required to support at least people part of their religious communities in these ways when there were hard times.

00:19:00.420 That's gone now.

00:19:01.760 That's not set up.

00:19:03.320 Well, and, and so here I'm going to, I'm going to move further with some actual data on this paradox, because it's been studied in real world environments.

00:19:10.840 Hmm, so a 2006 study conducted in Pakistan directly tested Tocqueville's thesis using a survey experiment.

00:19:19.020 The researchers manipulated participants' perceptions of their economic well-being and social mobility.

00:19:24.600 As predicted by the theory, they found that political discontent often increased the most when declining personal well-being coincided with high perceived social mobility.

00:19:35.600 So, to explain a bit how this experiment worked, the key manipulation involved presenting different income brackets to each group when asking about their household income.

00:19:44.680 The treatment group saw income brackets with higher ranges, making their own income seem relatively low.

00:19:50.740 The control group was shown income brackets with lower ranges, making their own income seem more typical.

00:19:56.700 For example, the middle income bracket for the control group was only 4,000 to 6,000 Rs, while the middle bracket for the treatment group was much higher.

00:20:07.360 Findings.

00:20:08.300 The results supported Tocqueville's theory.

00:20:10.000 Political discontent was found to increase most significantly when individuals perceived a decline in their personal economic well-being.

00:20:17.140 So, basically, they were able to manipulate an individual's beliefs about how they were doing in society, and people would present both lower levels of personal.

00:20:27.540 So, keep in mind, the actual person's experience, like their physical experience day-to-day, wasn't the same, right?

00:20:35.760 They had the same gadgets.

00:20:38.040 They had the same property.

00:20:39.620 They had the same education.

00:20:40.820 They had the same spouse.

00:20:42.760 And yet, they would report more discontentment if they believed that there were other people that had more than them.

00:20:50.280 Because it's all relative.

00:20:51.380 We're always looking at how we compare to other people.

00:20:55.220 And this led to political discontentment in their answers as well.

00:20:59.520 Now, this creates a big problem when you are considering the way the online algorithm presents things to you, right?

00:21:05.880 Because what you are getting served often is to, like, friendship, what pornography is to sex.

00:21:15.800 Yeah, super stimuli.

00:21:16.980 The super stimuli of affluence and hyperconsumption.

00:21:21.620 Mm-hmm.

00:21:22.520 So, the people that you see, whether it is on YouTube or Twitter or, well, really anywhere, TikTok, stuff like that, like any of these things where you're consuming content,

00:21:33.680 these individuals are going to be dramatically wealthier than the average individual.

00:21:37.960 Not just because people click more on wealthy content, but the content that individuals get served the most is often the super influencers.

00:21:44.620 Because, you know, they just touch so many people and these systems are not as built for the micro influencers.

00:21:49.760 Totally.

00:21:50.120 Where it's really hard to get out of that micro stance.

00:21:52.240 But once you become the super influencer position, you're just making astronomical amounts of money from the platform itself.

00:21:58.380 Which means now you are showing off a lifestyle and making suggestions about a lifestyle that someone could lead that is completely unrealistic for the average American.

00:22:09.700 Well, and also people like stuff that's aspirational.

00:22:12.560 We don't want to see what we have already.

00:22:14.700 We want to see something different, something novel.

00:22:18.440 And that often is something unsustainably expensive.

00:22:21.420 Well, and, you know, and this really messes with people in dating markets as well.

00:22:24.840 So, if you look at something like women, there's all these things where they're like, oh, what income do you want the guy you're dating to have? 1.00

00:22:32.580 And the incomes that they throw out there are completely unrealistic.

00:22:35.440 And there's been some great shows that have been like, what do you think the average person in America makes?

00:22:39.420 Right?

00:22:39.980 What would you want his income to be?

00:22:41.500 I feel like this is going to sound bad.

00:22:42.740 I feel like, like, $300,000.

00:22:44.880 I would have to say $127,000.

00:22:47.440 Probably $150,000 to a quarter of a million a year.

00:22:51.180 $500,000?

00:22:52.060 Is that bad?

00:22:56.280 $150,000 maybe to $250,000 a year would be... 1.00

00:23:00.200 What kind of stupid-ass question is this? 1.00

00:23:01.840 I was just having this conversation with my friend. 1.00

00:23:05.040 And she was like, you have to manifest a husband, girl. 1.00

00:23:08.980 Ideally, my husband needs to be making, like, $650,000.

00:23:13.640 What the heck?

00:23:14.400 So, you said you want $500,000, but what do you think the median income is for a 30-year-old?

00:23:19.140 $60,000?

00:23:20.000 $70,000?

00:23:20.780 Yeah.

00:23:21.220 I think it's $250,000.

00:23:23.480 And right now, so you know that median salary in 2022 in America was $37,500 per year.

00:23:31.600 And then if you go just a few years ago to 2012, it was $26,500.

00:23:38.740 Wow.

00:23:39.740 Most of that is actually inflation right now.

00:23:41.560 Yeah.

00:23:42.760 2012, $26,500 is what the median American was making.

00:23:47.100 And so, when people are making these comparisons to the social media people, to et cetera, they think, and I've even noticed this among people who I know, they think, like, the average American is making, like, around $50,000 per year.

00:23:58.240 The funny thing, though, when I now look at the amount of social services you get when you live out or near the poverty line, I feel like there's this really weird bump in society where someone making money around the poverty line has about the same amount of wealth.

00:24:26.500 The same amount of wealth as someone who lives maybe at the $50,000 level, weirdly.

00:24:32.180 I'd say that that is about right, given the way that we structured our system at this point, which creates a lot of intergenerational negative incentives.

00:24:40.440 Yeah, disincentives to work more or get more educated.

00:24:43.100 Because in the end, like, when you enter the workforce, for example, that, like, you put your family into a higher tax bracket, and then you lose all these services, and why would you do that when you have a lot more flexibility with your family and have government services?

00:24:55.140 Yeah, it's not great.

00:24:57.340 So, I'll move to another study here.

00:24:59.540 Do it.

00:24:59.880 In 2022, a study examined the relationship between basic and enhanced capabilities, as defined by the 2019 Human Development Report, and social attitudes over time.

00:25:10.360 The researchers hypothesized that if the correlation between basic needs and positive social attitudes declined, while the correlation with enhanced needs rose, it would indicate a shift consistent with the Tocqueville effect.

00:25:24.800 It investigated possible reasons for the global deterioration of social attitudes, despite greater economic prosperity, wider dissemination of technology, and reductions in poverty.

00:25:34.500 The deterioration manifests as deeper political polarization, loss in trust in organizations, and lower tolerance for dissenting views and opinions.

00:25:41.840 Key findings suggest that the deterioration of social attitudes could be linked to perceived increases in corruption, administration, inefficiency, the perceived disinformation through information technology, and economic inequality and gender disparities that may not really exist.

00:25:56.580 And I think this is also interesting if you talk about social progress, is the Tocqueville paradox can be used to explain things like women's rights as well.

00:26:04.400 A lot of women today seem to have a complete misunderstanding of what women historically actually lived like, and the level of rights that even American women lived without until fairly recently.

00:26:19.360 Right.

00:26:19.920 And also you've got the problem with the feminist movement, where it's kind of this machine that has no solution. 0.62

00:26:26.600 Yeah, good point.

00:26:27.840 Before I go further.

00:26:29.400 No, go on.

00:26:31.540 So this is actually a really interesting side part of the Tocqueville paradox, and it's called the integration paradox among minorities.

00:26:37.660 So this paper called the integration paradox, a review and meta-analysis of the complex relationship between integration and reports of discrimination, examines a counterintuitive phenomenon where more integrated immigrants report higher levels of perceived discrimination.

00:26:53.860 Here are the key points about this research.

00:26:55.880 The study is a meta-analysis combining data from 42 different studies across various countries to provide a comprehensive look at the integration paradox.

00:27:03.380 The integration paradox refers to the finding that well-educated and socially well-integrated immigrants and their descendants are more likely to report experience of discrimination than less integrated immigrants.

00:27:15.460 One key finding is that better integration, including higher education levels and improved language skills, seems to correlate with increased reports of discrimination and feelings of exclusion.

00:27:26.840 So, thoughts on this?

00:27:28.180 I mean, part of that just seems intuitively to make sense, because if you're not around people who are different from you, you don't really have an opportunity to feel like they're treating you differently, if you know what I mean?

00:27:40.380 Well, if I'm not around immigrants, for example, I wouldn't think that people, like I wouldn't have an opportunity to think I'm discriminated against.

00:27:47.300 Well, I think a key angle of this as well is that the type of immigrants that do not integrate with society understand non-integration, i.e. they understand the motivations for the society to not want them to integrate as well. 0.99

00:28:02.120 Oh, I see.

00:28:02.740 Yeah.

00:28:02.900 So, they're less, they're less, they're actually more likely to maybe discriminate themselves and be cool with it.

00:28:08.060 But, yeah, it's well, to understand, they are more likely to, I imagine, you know, if somebody is like, well, you know, we're American here and you're not American over there, like you're not acting like an American, so, you know, I'm not going to invite you to my barbecue.

00:28:21.860 And they'd be like, well, yeah, of course, I wouldn't want to invite you to my, like, cultural event either, because I don't want you polluting it with your Americanism and making it less, you know, Hataka. 0.99

00:28:32.040 Hataka's a made-up culture. 1.00

00:28:33.380 I'm not, like, making fun of, like, the Hataka religion, given that we are living in 2024, I had to go back in post and just make sure that the word I made up for a made-up cultural group was not an ethnic slur or something like that.

00:28:47.500 And it appears I got away with it this time.

00:28:49.620 It is dangerously close to Hataka, the ceremonial practice in Maui culture, and dangerously close to Hataka, a concept in Hinduism, but that wouldn't have been a cultural group, so it couldn't be taken as a slur in this context.

00:29:06.300 So I got away with it this time, got away with making up a word, a random word, and it didn't happen to have been an ethnic slur at some point.

00:29:14.200 And you would be really messing it up with all your Americanness and lack of cultural understanding, and yet the individual who strives for complete integration, they would take that as a slight.

00:29:25.860 And I love that they were also like, it's not about whining.

00:29:28.740 They made that clear.

00:29:29.680 But I think part of it probably is about whining, because what the person is integrating with when they're integrating is the urban monoculture.

00:29:36.740 And given that the urban monoculture has in part a status hierarchy based around discrimination, it socially and emotionally rewards individuals who claim to have experienced discrimination.

00:29:48.640 And thus, individuals would intrinsically, anything that's socially and emotionally rewarded is going to be talked about more and ironically experienced more.

00:29:58.120 So when an individual wants to gain status within these societies, they don't ever want to feel like they're lying about their discrimination.

00:30:04.300 Nobody goes at this feeling like they're the bad guy.

00:30:06.880 So they actually create moments of discrimination for themselves to experience, and it feels as bad as real discrimination.

00:30:16.260 What else is a microaggression other than a created, discriminated experience that wasn't really an experience of discrimination?

00:30:25.140 It's funny because it's so male versus female, and I wonder if this is a more broad, natural law around collectivism or social integration versus individualism.

00:30:37.520 Because, you know, men sort of by design are a little bit more on the individualistic end of the spectrum.

00:30:42.700 Go big or go home.

00:30:43.720 Not all of them get to reproduce. 0.99

00:30:45.420 You know, male lions get thrown out by the pride and have to figure their own shit out when they hit adolescence. 0.95

00:30:50.800 And men are more likely to stand around and say things like, I'm the best. 0.97

00:30:56.180 I'm, you know, I'm doing great, even when they're not.

00:30:58.940 Whereas women, you know, the classic trope is girls, like from mean girls, you know, them all standing in front of the mirror and being like, oh, I hate my legs. 1.00

00:31:06.140 Oh, I hate my nose. 0.58

00:31:07.180 Oh, I hate everything.

00:31:08.520 And then they look to, you know, that one girl and they're like waiting for her to say how she hates herself and how, you know, everything's horrible with her.

00:31:14.220 And there needs to be this shared misery and unhappiness with how they are.

00:31:19.440 And like, I wonder, it's just, it's weird that there's that pattern, the sort of feminine victimhood or self-hatred versus masculine confidence and individuality.

00:31:30.220 Yeah, and we're also seeing more of a divide between the genders and which party they're working with, which could represent a relation to this. 1.00

00:31:41.000 But I think what I take from this is that it's important to have daily rituals in whatever tradition you're creating of appreciating what you have that your ancestors didn't have.

00:31:52.340 And that's something that we should go into our family, maybe once a week at dinner or something like that for the kids.

00:31:58.080 Yeah, some perspective.

00:31:59.440 We have a specific day where we go over that.

00:32:02.140 And two, the individual study history from the perspective of knowing what it was like to live during those times.

00:32:09.720 Yeah, well, you know who does this really well is Jews and Mormons. 1.00

00:32:13.080 Yeah, the Jews, a lot of their holidays are basically around this.

00:32:16.740 It was look at how hard our ancestors had it during this time period.

00:32:19.960 And for Mormons, for people who don't know, you have like your pioneer trip where you've got to go out and live like the ancestors who were coming up.

00:32:26.580 And it's considered quite a grueling experience.

00:32:28.280 And a lot of modern kids are like, it was the hardest time of my life.

00:32:32.540 We didn't have enough food.

00:32:34.160 I had to pull a wagon. 0.99

00:32:36.900 And it does suck. 0.99

00:32:38.240 It does suck. 0.98

00:32:39.540 But their whole lives used to be like that. 0.87

00:32:41.800 And reflecting on that is really important.

00:32:44.380 Yeah, perspective is so helpful.

00:32:46.800 Yeah.

00:32:46.920 Those are two really useful ceremonies.

00:32:49.320 And you and I need to talk about like building a holiday like this for our kids or building a regular thing for our kids that we can build into like the techno-puritan family religion.

00:32:59.120 I agree.

00:33:00.120 And I feel that there's also kind of a mindset in terms of the way that a family can set a healthy precedent about how we normalize to societal standards.

00:33:12.100 Because while I would expect myself as an avid consumer of Instagram to be subject to this status anxiety, because I look at a ton of content by especially families and parents.

00:33:25.900 So people like us, people living like us, but who have way more money.

00:33:29.960 I mean, think about Ballerina Farms.

00:33:31.440 But then there are a bunch of other parent influencers who live in these very expensive mansions and have all the best clothes for their kids and take them to these insanely expensive places and do all these things for them that I can't do. 0.84

00:33:42.460 Because, you know, we're financially constrained and apparently they're not.

00:33:46.380 But it doesn't bother me at all.

00:33:47.620 In fact, I look at what they do and how they live and I'm like, oh my God, like that costs so much money.

00:33:53.060 Oh my God, the size of their, oh my.

00:33:55.440 You know, and I just, I kind of.

00:33:57.740 Well, I think it's because you and I have created an internal family culture that really finds opulence to a degree repellent.

00:34:06.820 Yeah, and I think that we've talked about this in other podcasts, also shaming opulence or having our own internal form of, oh, we haven't, we're not going to run this podcast, but our own internal form of sumptuary laws where we kind of shame excessive consumption.

00:34:24.120 We can talk quickly because we're not going to run the sumptuary laws podcast.

00:34:27.480 What are our internal family rules around that?

00:34:29.620 Internal family rules that we decided around would be that you never go into debt unless you are buying one, a used car or two-way house, but you don't even go into debt for school.

00:34:39.200 You don't take any other form of personal loan and you don't even take business loans.

00:34:43.620 And then we would also.

00:34:45.240 You can't take business loans if it's like a large private equity thing, but not for like your first business.

00:34:49.840 Yes, don't take like a personal loan to buy a bunch of equipment to start your food truck business, et cetera, because a lot of people do that and it does not work out well.

00:34:58.180 And most first businesses fail and then you're stuck with debt.

00:35:01.520 And typically because, you know, you're starting, it's a high interest personal loan.

00:35:04.500 It's the one that I love of your, of your rules was no luxury branding on your clothing.

00:35:10.340 Or any, if there's any consumer product where there is a generic or different brand that is widely available of similar quality, you, you should not, and should be shamed for buying.

00:35:21.800 You should not buy and you should be shamed for buying the branded version.

00:35:25.220 So any sort of designer purse, any sort of thing like that is, is something to be shamed because for example, these days, like a Louis Vuitton purse, even a Nermez handbag, they're not really made at the level of quality that is significantly better than something made by a really good Etsy seller.

00:35:41.540 Who is also making it by hand, who is also making the best materials possible, but at a fraction of the price and it will last longer.

00:35:49.760 So, and then you also had a rule around closing is that the closing had to be made with durable material.

00:35:55.320 Yeah.

00:35:55.580 So none of this clothing, because we, we looked through the stats that, you know, clothing is, is worn on average seven times.

00:36:01.980 And the average piece of clothing in the EU and US is, is like under two years, really insane.

00:36:08.900 And then we only wear 10% of the clothing that we buy regularly.

00:36:12.580 So huge curtailing of the type of clothing that we buy and the variation in outfits that we buy, because it is just incredibly wasteful.

00:36:21.100 And then the final rule you had was, was dressed with intentionality, which was to say that your outfit is designed not to fulfill some sort of fashion goal, but some goal that you have in society.

00:36:33.520 Like you live for X reason, what sort of public persona is best going to be able to achieve that?

00:36:39.940 Which means that for most people, they will be wearing a personal uniform that they decided on with their spouse.

00:36:45.920 But this is all to say, I don't think it's just about getting historical perspective and building in holidays and routines around that.

00:36:53.860 I think it's also about having an internal culture in which you say, we are different.

00:36:58.820 We do not hold ourselves to the standard of the Joneses. 0.94

00:37:01.380 And therefore we have no desire to keep up with the Joneses because we're too busy shitting all over the Joneses. 0.96

00:37:05.980 And that's more fun anyway. 0.90

00:37:07.680 Honestly, though, I think it's super understated how much fun it is to make fun of other people.

00:37:12.960 In fact, it's so much more fun than trying to keep up with them.

00:37:15.040 So I feel like this is the easier and much lower stress solution.

00:37:18.860 And it's bizarre to me that more people don't come to it.

00:37:21.480 I agree with you 100%.

00:37:23.420 And I am so lucky to have such a based and delight, delightsome and have-

00:37:28.700 Demure.

00:37:29.080 That's the new, that's the new term among conservatives that's being mocked by progressives.

00:37:33.140 Demure.

00:37:34.240 I like delightsome.

00:37:35.980 It's a Mormon term.

00:37:36.800 It sounds, it sounds very Mormon. 1.00

00:37:38.420 Yeah, I love it.

00:37:39.020 They have it a few times in their, after I read it the first time, I was like, oh, that's just such a great way to describe my life.

00:37:44.200 You want to make delightsome happen?

00:37:46.060 You're delightsome, Simone.

00:37:47.820 Is that anyway?

00:37:48.500 So I'll say, you know, we've got a lot of new fans right now.

00:37:53.000 We really appreciate you guys coming, watching the show.

00:37:55.800 We've got it in some other places as well.

00:37:57.240 If you want to go to like the podcast version, always like and subscribe.

00:38:00.000 It helps us, especially liking those podcasts.

00:38:04.020 If you can give us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, that would mean a lot to us.

00:38:08.360 And it would mean a lot to us if you subscribe.

00:38:10.920 What's that other podcast platform we're on?

00:38:13.500 Well, we're on Spotify.

00:38:14.320 We're on all the major podcast platforms.

00:38:16.580 Spotify.

00:38:16.760 But five-star reviews on Apple Podcasts have the most impact.

00:38:22.580 They do?

00:38:23.740 Because that's where you can actually see like review counts.

00:38:26.160 On Spotify, you can only see number of subscribers.

00:38:29.200 Oh, I was unaware.

00:38:30.380 Anyway, love you to Desimone.

00:38:32.460 Have a spectacular day.

00:38:34.980 Bye.

00:38:35.520 Love you.

00:38:35.980 Ciao, ciao, ciao.

00:38:36.600 Goodbye.

00:38:37.160 Ciao, ciao.

00:38:37.660 No, you hang up.

00:38:40.780 I treasure these times of day.

00:38:48.160 Oh, that's a new type of beer.

00:38:49.820 What's up with that?

00:38:50.600 Where's the Coors?

00:38:52.260 What's going on?

00:38:54.200 What I have right now is Extra Light.

00:38:55.680 It's half the alcohol.

00:38:57.740 Oh, Extra Light.

00:38:59.920 Intriguing.

00:39:00.380 Very intriguing.

00:39:02.600 Oh.

00:39:04.940 All right.

00:39:07.720 Boop.

00:39:11.160 Okay.

00:39:14.180 Boom.

Based Camp - August 29, 2024

The Tocqueville Paradox： Why Does Discontent Rise as Societal Conditions Improve？

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript