RSS
Facebook
Twitter
E-PrinceCriticisms of Princeton’s political apathy have become a fixture of campus discourse. Civic disengagement has been weaved into a powerful narrative about wealthy, intellectually uncurious students sitting in an “Orange Bubble” and going about their narcissistic pursuits. This narrative ...(back to the article)
The opinions expressed here are those of the individual commenters and do not necessarily represent the views of The Daily Princetonian Publishing Company, Inc. We do not take responsibility for the opinions, facts, or claims presented by individual commenters, and reserve the right to moderate or delete inappropriate comments.
LOVE THIS ARTICLE!
Well said. I feel the same way about the environmentalist student groups on campus, and that's the reason I haven't joined one.
Soylent Green is People! I love that reference, and I love this article.
Seriously, this is without a doubt the best article I have read in the Prince my entire career at Princeton. It is interesting, well-written, and most of all, insightful. And @2012, the point of this article wasn't to systematically condemn campus groups. In fact, I'm pretty sure the entire point of this article was to dissuade dogmatic opinions such as that. Our goal as Princeton students should be the scholarly inquiry of today's most important issues.
Fantastic article, Saraf!
Yes, hopefully, more students will become less well-red and more well-read.
Well said, Saraf. A piece of true gold in the muddy waters of the Prince...
Our brains have many specific adaptations tuned for the hunter-gatherer environment in which we evolved, which in some ways differs wildly from the modern world. Consider the prevalence of obesity: we eat according to outdated instincts, feasting before a famine that never comes, rather than adapting to our new world of caloric abundance.
Similarly, many people have an intuitive “folk economics” which includes a number of biases such as the anti-foreign and make-work biases. These beliefs are demonstrably wrong, ubiquitous, stubbornly resistant to argument and can be tied to to aspects of the pre-agricultural economy, strongly suggesting they are an evolved adaptation. While economically literate libertarians delightedly skewer those who argue mistakenly from folk economics, we constantly engage in what I shall call folk activism.
In early human tribes, there were few enough people in each social structure such that anyone could change policy. If you didn’t like how the buffalo meat got divvied up, you could propose an alternative, build a coalition around it, and actually make it happen. Success required the agreement of tens of allies — yet those same instincts now drive our actions when success requires the agreement of tens of millions. When we read in the evening paper that we’re footing the bill for another bailout, we react by complaining to our friends, suggesting alternatives, and trying to build coalitions for reform. This primal behavior is as good a guide for how to effectively reform modern political systems as our instinctive taste for sugar and fat is for how to eat nutritiously.
bleah.
favorite part: "we're also like 20"
It is not the norm for people our age to have enough engagement with issues to really be that political! Nice article!
It should be the norm. Unfortunately, we succumb to brainwashing by the interventionist policies of the US supported by the Princeton faculty.
Ideas about freedom and liberty are squashed before they can properly form.