Hi Von,

I tend to agree with many of Elliot's main conclusions, but I often disagree with how he talks to people, such as how he responded to you here.

I do think the segment you highlighted (about America being ugly, etc) is accurate within a certain framing, but I also think it is misleading, because that framing, I think, doesn't take a very broad or realistic view of the human condition or human history as a whole.

Because if you take a broader view, basically what you see is that nature is UGLY TO THE CORE. Animals are brutal to each other - they play with their prey, eat each other alive, and leave their young to die. And humans basically just pick up and embellish upon where animals leave off.

Humans have a lot of vices, but they are all essentially just survival instincts gone awry. They are instincts designed specifically for survival in the brutal world of nature. I'm not Catholic, but the seven deadly sins do sum them up quite well, with greed, wrath, and pride being particularly relevant to this conversation.

Historically, any people who happen to have power over other people pretty much always exercise these vices at the expense of the disempowered people. White people happen to have generally had the most power in the last few centuries, and have therefore been uniquely positioned to demonstrate these vices most recently. But I think it's anti-historical to think of this as a white people problem, rather than an all people problem.

And within that context, it seems like if you present a set of beliefs that take as their core assumption the idea that a particular country and people with certain skin color are uniquely ugly, then I think what you have is a belief system that does not well represent reality, that is not interested in representing reality, and is therefore not well poised to take us to the future where we want to be.

Does any of that make sense to you, or how might you critique that viewpoint?