Rob Henderson Profile picture
Nov 20, 2021 9 tweets 6 min read Read on X
Isaiah Berlin contrasts 2 theories of history

Personal theories stress character, purpose, and motives of individuals; these theories are viewed as vain and ignorant

Impersonal theories emphasize custom, culture, economics, and inevitability; viewed as serious and insightful
He writes that the "teleological" view is that individual responsibility is illusion. All disorder, disaster, suffering is because we don't understand the underlying meaning of things. If we understood the "real reason" behind events, we'd no longer suffer oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0…
Whether due to mystical forces, physical cause-and-effect, or cyclical patterns of history, it's the view that "everything happens for a reason" and "it couldn't be otherwise." These theories rest on the belief that freedom of choice is ultimately an illusion.
So praise and blame have no place within this view— "we are what we are, like stones and trees, like bees and beavers." Just as it is irrational to expect justice or fairness from animals or soil, so it is with humans.
So supposedly only "the acutest and most gifted" people discover these hidden truths of historical inevitability. The rest of us are blind to what truly shapes our lives. People like Hegel and Marx believed that at certain moments, "historical advances" are "due" to occur.
The view of this form of determinism or historical inevitability is that it is rational to side with power—and irrational to be on the wrong side of history.
The belief in historical inevitability means that everything must occur as it does (bc of mystical forces, physical cause-and-effect, or w/e). So it is silly to blame historical figures for what they do. Warlords, dictators, mass murderers, etc. "are like floods and earthquakes"
Believers in historical inevitability think it's foolish to hold individuals in whatever historical period responsible, and that we should view events with detachment. But this reveals that they think people who act don't have free will, but interpreters of those actions do...
"How silly of you to blame Napoleon for his actions. He had no choice. He was a product of his time, place, class, culture, and political system."

This kind of statement implicitly reveals the belief that actors have no free will, but people who interpret their acts do have it.

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More from @robkhenderson

Feb 16
3 interesting findings:

1. On Tinder, women in their twenties are roughly twice as likely to swipe right (“like”) for the same man if he has a master's degree compared with a bachelor's degree.
2. Sociometric status (respect and admiration from peers) is a stronger predictor of happiness than socioeconomic status. This finding held up after controlling for gender, ethnicity, and extraversion.
3. From Thomas Sowell’s book Vision of the Anointed: “The family is inherently an obstacle to schemes for central control...Engels’ first draft of the Communist Manifesto included a deliberate undermining of family...Marx was astute enough to leave that out of the final version."
Read 4 tweets
Dec 25, 2023
My most popular Substack posts of 2022:

1. How I Read: Non-secrets for voracious reading robkhenderson.com/p/how-i-read
2. Why Dumb Ideas Capture Smart and Successful People robkhenderson.com/p/how-dumb-ide…
3. The Paradox of Liberation: Reflections on the sexual revolution debate robkhenderson.com/p/the-paradox-…
Read 12 tweets
Dec 13, 2023
3 interesting findings:

1. In contentious disputes with another person, a man is nearly twice as likely to apologize if his adversary is a woman and 3X more likely to physically attack if his adversary is a man.
2. Despite being only 1.2 percent of the population, psychopaths commit 30 to 40 percent of all violent crimes.
3. When two women are engaged in conversation, they usually face each other. But when two men are engaged in friendly conversation, they almost always stand at an angle of about 120 degrees, so that they are nearly standing side-by-side. This is because typically the only time men stare straight at each other is when they are about to engage verbal or physical conflict.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 15, 2023
Lots of discussion at the sexual revolution debate about whether the revolution failed men, or failed women, or helped men more than women, or helped women more than men. Nobody asked whether the sexual revolution failed children. People already know. Too depressing a topic.
The sexual revolution did not fail— it succeeded in its aim: more freedom. Today people (esp women, are less happy but more free. What’s more important—happiness or freedom? For adults, freedom. Better for people to have the ability to choose badly than have no choice at all.
But children lack the maturity to make good choices, so for kids happiness is more important than freedom.

So what’s more important, happiness for children, or freedom for adults? Our society has decided, and there’s no going back.
Read 4 tweets
Sep 7, 2023
“A stringer is a man who strings women along…they con women into wasting the years when they are most attractive and most likely to get a proposal…If a man had even one long-term relationship with someone else, he’s very likely to be a stringer.” today.com/health/reason-…
On average, for every guy who perpetually strings girls along in relationships with no ring, he is responsible for two women who remain unmarried into older age. Image
Male survey respondents were most likely to answer honestly if an older man asked the questions. But if the surveyor was a younger man or a women, male respondents would give canned politically correct answers. Image
Read 7 tweets
Aug 9, 2023
Three interesting findings:

1. People who believe that it's wrong to have children (anti-natalists) are much more likely to score highly on Dark Triad personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism).
2. Study with more than 11 thousand participants in 45 countries: Attractive men and women are viewed as relatively more intelligent, dominant, trustworthy, confident, responsible, caring, and sociable. They are also viewed as less weird and more happy.
3. The average age of a founder of a highly profitable tech company is 42.3 years old. The media-driven belief that successful founders tend to be young is untrue—older founders consistently have higher probabilities of success.
Read 4 tweets

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