Rob Henderson Profile picture
Aug 29, 2021 11 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Mao enacted a campaign called "Recalling Bitterness" to battle "lukewarm attitudes" about the socialist revolution

The regime forced people into rituals describing how bad life was before they had been "liberated," aim was to reshape memories of the past
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.11…
The communist regime appointed writers and artists to retell stories about class struggle "to suit the needs of different political agendas"

Officials of the state would often manipulate these stories, "there was a gradual blurring of the boundary between history and fiction"
Lin Biao (Minister of Defense) stated that "If the past bitterness is not understood, the present sweetness will be unknown. Some might regard today's sweetness as bitterness." The regime aimed to energize grievances to ensure revolutionary fervor did not die
Mao blamed the Great Famine (30M~ starved to death) and its resulting resentments among the survivors on a lack of revolutionary spirit among the people
Regime officials held meetings encouraging peasants to describe how much better life was now compared to "pre-liberation," hoping to convince them that "successes outnumbered failures."

"Only poor peasants were allowed to speak; former landlords and rich peasants were silenced."
Some communist officials would whisper disagreements about Mao's belief that "hatred and struggle" was a permanent and absolute pattern in class relations, and Mao's methods of relentlessly highlighting, distorting, and politicizing peasants' past suffering
The regime would collect "bitterness" reports from peasants which were carefully approved by high-ranking officials for dissemination. Even then, the recollections of bitterness were pretty mundane. Nothing comparable to starving to death or being tortured in a detention center
Important to remember the bad old days

Officials "reiterated the necessity of educating youths who had not experienced life in the old society. Due to their lack of life experiences in the dark old society...young people were vulnerable to the corruption of bourgeois ideology"
Regime newspaper said peasants were "deprived of the opportunity to learn 'correct' and 'scientific' historical knowledge and were largely misled by folklore fabricated by the exploitative class"

Regime viewed historical knowledge as an arena to wage war against "reactionaries"
The regime fabricated stories and published them as fact, including a bizarre myth about a female tenant-farmer locked in a landlord's "water dungeon"

In these stories, landlords & capitalists "were portrayed as extremely brutal and inhumane, particularly to women and children"
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More from @robkhenderson

Mar 6
3 interesting findings:

1. If you want a happy and long-term romance, pick a partner with high levels of agreeableness and conscientiousness. These traits are associated with longer and happier marriages. Men and women high in conscientiousness tend to be more faithful.
2. Seventy years ago the psychologist Hans Eysenck found evidence that authoritarianism existed among left-wingers as well as right-wingers. He was ignored by both American and British intellectuals because, at the time, they greatly admired Joseph Stalin.
3. Machiavelli's reading routine: Image
Read 4 tweets
Feb 6
3 interesting findings:

1. Unlike motherhood, which is relatively evenly distributed across the female status hierarchy, men with higher lifetime earnings, higher net worth, higher educational attainment, and higher leadership skills have more children over their lifetimes.
2. People under 25 are evenly split on the question of whether JK Rowling should be dropped by her publishers for her criticism of transgenderism, while nobody over 45 thinks she should be cancelled. These more illiberal generations will be the median voter by the 2040s.
3. Women are more likely to wear high heels if they anticipate interacting with an attractive male, and less likely if they anticipate interacting with an unattractive male. Desire predicts the inclination to wear high-heeled rather than low-heeled shoes.
Read 4 tweets
Jan 18
Three interesting findings:

1. While men are nearly 18 percent faster than women in 5K races, they are only 11 percent faster in marathons, 3.7 percent faster at 50 miles, roughly even as they approach 100 miles, and then women routinely outpace men at races 195 miles and up.
2. In a longitudinal study on happiness, the most reliable indicator of being happy and healthy at age 80 was relationship satisfaction, especially within marriages, which proved to be the strongest predictor of a fulfilling and healthy life.
3. Behaviors associated with high Openness on the Big 5:

•Eating something spicy for breakfast

•Lounging around the house with no clothes on

•Spending an hour at a time daydreaming

•Buying a book

•Swearing

•Reading poetry
Read 4 tweets
Sep 19, 2024
Some pieces of advice Machiavelli offers to rulers:

•Punishment should be delivered in a swift and brutal manner, while rewards should be dispersed in small amounts over time

🧵 1/
•Religion must be promoted regardless of how truthful it is, because it supplies social solidarity

2/
•When you confer benefits to the people, make sure to do so yourself. But let minions do the dirty work of inflicting punishments because then they, not you, will be blamed, and you can then gain the people’s favor by cutting off your minions’ heads

3/
Read 16 tweets
May 30, 2024
Fertility among college-educated women hasn't changed much since a generation ago. Fertility collapse is among poor women. In 1994, the average age of a first-time mother without a university degree was 20. Today, two-thirds of women without degrees in their 20s have no children. Image
A generation ago, a poor woman would have children with a man in the hope that this would lead to marriage and family. This seldom happened. Those children witnessed this failure, absorbed its lessons, grew up, and now are simply not having kids.
Read 4 tweets
May 20, 2024
Wrong. They're expensive. Takes yrs to cultivate an understanding of them; to keep up with them, to express them without error. Helps to be immersed in affluence from birth. This is why Bourdieu, Fussell, Fitzgerald etc wrote real mobility is something of a myth.
Saying defund the police in 2024 is like wearing Canada Goose in 2019. You reveal yourself as behind the fashion; a wannabe; an arriviste. Cringe. etc. Gotta be close to the source of the trends (typically elite institutions). Requires money, connections, cultural capital etc.
Luxury beliefs are expensive for the believer to acquire (money, connections, education, habitus, cultural capital, etc.) and costless to express.
Read 4 tweets

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