Nervous States: the decline of reason

Elites worship the seeming objectivity of data and statistics. But people don’t live them.

Just about no one lives in the averages of income growth and GDP. So we begin to doubt them. One telling example: leading into Brexit, one research team showed data about immigrants made voters more distrustful, but telling them a story about people did.  

That’s from the 2019 book Nervous States: How Feeling Took Over the World, where Davies argues that as economic and political systems became harder to understand and less trustworthy, public life shifted toward feelings as a kind of evidence—especially fear, anger, resentment, and humiliation.

Contemporary politics is being driven less by reasoned debate or material interests and more by collective anxiety—a “nervous” condition where people constantly scan for threats, react viscerally and look for emotional certainty when trust in institutions, experts, and shared facts has eroded.

He links this to the rise of populism and culture-war politics, showing how leaders and media can weaponize emotion, how “security” logics blur into everyday governance, and how people seek belonging and recognition in a landscape that feels unstable. The book isn’t saying emotions are irrational or illegitimate; it’s warning that when anxiety becomes the default political atmosphere, it can crowd out deliberation and make societies easier to polarize and manipulate.

Below I have my notes for future reference.

My notes

• “Where events are unfolding rapidly and emotions are riding high, there is a sudden absence of any authoritative perspective on reality”
• Mid 17th century distinctions: body and mind; war and peace: Their breakdown and the murky in between leave nervous states
• Feeling; physical sensations and mental emotions
• Rene Descartes: rational brain over physical sensations
• Thomas Hobbes. The central job of the state is to eradicate feeling that could lead to violence
• Hannah Arendt: the west’s “curious passion” for objectivity (economics, statistics) is from the Homeric narrative
• The scientific method isn’t important now because it is smart “but that it is slow and careful”
• Gustave Le Bon argued in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895) that crowds are inherently irrational, impulsive, and emotional, acting as a “collective soul” that erodes individual reasoning. He believed they cannot maintain peace, as they are destructive and erratic, but they are capable of heroic, high-stakes war acts under strong leadership.
• Bernays Propoganda: Edward Bernays’ 1928 book Propaganda argues that shaping public sentiment is essential for orderly democratic function, as it guides the masses who are otherwise chaotic. He posits that intelligent minorities should use propaganda to mold public opinion, rather than merely reacting to public demands, treating this as a necessary, invisible government.
• Criticizes of March for Science because it brought reason into the polical sphere
• Roger Pielke Jr.’s “The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics” (2007) defines an “honest broker” as a scientist or expert who works to expand or clarify the range of options available to policymakers, rather than pushing a specific agenda. This role contrasts with pure scientists, science arbiters, and issue advocates, offering a framework for experts to engage in political discussions without becoming partisan advocates.
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) published Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil in April 1651. Written in Exile: Hobbes wrote Leviathan while living in Paris, France, having fled England in 1640 due to fears for his safety as a Royalist supporter during the buildup to the English Civil War. He spent 11 years in France. Context of War & Westphalia: The book was composed during the English Civil War (1642–1651). Its publication followed the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War and is widely regarded as establishing the modern system of sovereign nation-states. The Content: Leviathan argues that to avoid the “nasty, brutish, and short” state of nature (civil war/anarchy), individuals must enter a social contract and surrender their freedoms to an absolute, undivided sovereign authority (the “Leviathan”).
• The dispute between Thomas Hobbes and Robert Boyle (representing the Royal Society) centered on scientific methodology, pitting Hobbes’s deductive, philosophical approach against Boyle’s experimental, data-driven methods. While both acknowledged the political and merchant classes, their debate highlighted a need for trust in a small, elite group to validate knowledge — but all required trust in small group of elites
• Difference of military and civil violence
• The works “Political Arithmetick” and “The Political Anatomy of Ireland” were authored by Sir William Petty (1623–1687) Petty was an influential 17th-century economist, statistician, and philosopher who worked as an assistant/secretary to the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Paris during the 1640s. Political Arithmetick (written 1672–1676, published 1690) pioneered the use of statistical analysis in politics and economics
• Scientific Revolution brought government statistics too
• Ahead of Brexit, British Futures research showed that giving focus groups pro-immigrant statistics caused hostility (the numbers are fake!) but stories of contributing immigrants swayed them
• In 2014, Nigel Farage said there’s more than GDP
• Hobbes 1651, the chief purpose of the state (his sovereign) is to minimize violence and conflict within borders — Hobbes said ether agree to one sovereign or face chaos
• John Graunt (1620–1674), a London haberdasher, founded modern demography and epidemiology by pioneering the statistical analysis of death (“bills of mortality”
• Data help rulers make policy but doesn’t give meaning to individuals: “As states become more statistical in their outlook, the feeling arises that they don’t really care about the people themselves. On the most existential issue of them all, elites take up a different perspective from ordinary people.”
• National statistics promise us what all of us do in the aggregate and what practically none of us do in our real lives: (eg. unemployment figures)
• Statistics were first for the state but then also published for civil society (newspapers): funded by but independent of government is what gave them their legitimacy (because they could be used to criticize government)
• Charles Booth (London) and W.E.B. Du Bois (Philadelphia) collected primary survey data in the late 19th century to document poverty and inequality, Thomas Piketty has used massive longitudinal datasets to argue that wealth concentration is a fundamental, and politically actionable, feature of capitalism.
• Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities” theory (1983) posits that nations are socially constructed communities imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Anderson argued that print capitalism, rather than just 18th-century media, enabled people who would never meet to share a common language, symbols, and stories, forming a unified identity.
• Historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) argued that the modern concept of the nation—as an entity existing independently of, and often in opposition to, the state—emerged with the French Revolution (1789).
• For someone who has had no pay raise (or limited purchasing power growth), a nostalgic view of a past is far more compelling than average statistics saying things are getting better
• Francis Bacon outlined what a physician could offer “first the preservation of health, second the cure of disease and third the prolongation of life” —this was a science fiction then (when Aristotle idea of body-soul mix) but became true
• Cadaverous research and Descartes philosophy separated immortal soul and mortal body
• But we still believe to give permission to use our dead body — arguing it has some special meaning
• Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that U.S. life expectancy has diverged sharply by education level, with life expectancy for adults without a bachelor’s degree declining since 2010. A widening mortality gap means college-educated Americans now live significantly longer, with a 2021 gap of over eight years, driven by “deaths of despair” (drugs, alcohol, suicide).
• Relieving pain (which doesn’t “present” like a fever) vs relieving the disease
• Pain blurs mind and body (physical expression of emotion)
• Freud”beyond the pleasure principle” after WW1, later led to PTSD: it’s not just the trauma but the loss of power, which leads to a “compulsion to repeat” (later informed non suicidal self injury like cutting)
• Three times as many Americans died of opiate overdose than Vietnam war
• In 2013 article by Russian general Valery Gerasimov: nonmilitary acts of war have become more destabilizing than war, blurry lines between war and peace
• The Levée en masse, decreed on August 23, 1793, by the French National Convention, established the first modern, comprehensive system of mass conscription to defend the republic during the Revolutionary Wars. It officially placed all Frenchmen in permanent requisition for military service, fundamentally shifting warfare from professional armies to “nation-in-arms” citizen-soldiers
• Carl von Clausewitz’s masterpiece, On War (Vom Kriege), was indeed assembled post-mortem by his wife, Marie von Brühl, following his death in 1831. While often associated with the Napoleonic Wars, Clausewitz’s work was heavily influenced by the philosophical rigor of Immanuel Kant, particularly in its approach to structuring knowledge through analysis of opposites (theory vs. practice, absolute vs. real war), likely mediated by his tutor Johann Kiesewetter.
• Napoleon’s conscription forces were only slowed by Spanish guerilas (organized, informal people) and the Russian masses
• William James 1884: what is an emotion
• Thiel’s Zero to One: competition is for losers, what does that mean for science be information
• “Once knowledge is treated primarily as a business instrument, the instinct is develop ever faster and better tailored means of acquiring and controlling it”
• Otto Neurath’s “war economy” (Wirtschaftsplan) proposed a moneyless, centrally planned system based on direct calculation in kind, inspired by WWI logistical planning, to optimize social welfare. Ludwig von Mises responded in 1920, arguing that without money and market prices for capital goods, rational economic calculation is impossible, sparking the socialist calculation debate.
• “What was so valuable about entrepreneurs, Mises believed, was not that they knew for sure what techniques would work or which products would sell, but that they were prepared to act even when they didn’t. They were brave enough to take severe risks and (together with their investors) accept the consequences of failure.”
• As Joseph Jupiter wrote “as military action must be taken in a given strategic position, even if all the data potentially procurable are not available, so also an economic life action must be taken without working out all the details of what is to be done. Hear the success of everything depends upon intuition.”…. It wasn’t just money that motivated them but “the Will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others.”
• Von Mises felt that price discovery was the point
• Philip Mirowski, a historian of economic thought, positions Ludwig von Mises as a key figure within the development of the “Neoliberal Thought Collective,” an intellectual network that heavily influenced 20th-century economic debate.
• Friedrich August von Hayek self-identified as a “puzzler” (or sometimes “muddler”) rather than a “master of the subject,” a distinction he applied to distinguish between types of thinkers and scientific approaches
• the evolution of the Austrian School of Economics: Carl Manger to Von Mises to Von Hayek to Friedman
• Hayek’s Use of knowledge in society argued another kind of knowledge, that of entrepreneurs and mangers, when they “ put to use a machine, not fully employed, or somebody’s skill, which could be better utilized” argued the elites overlook this practical knowledge (embodied or tacit knowledge of how, not that)
• Elites view this as less objective but he argued the real world makes it less theoretical. These entrepreneurs are pursuing private knowledge, and that once there is consensus their advantage is gone (Hayek’s critique of expertise)
• Author: “But what happens when the scientific establishment does broadly agree on something, such as climate change or the health effects of smoking? Must the definition of ‘scientist’ be stretched until a dissenting voice can be found? Many libertarians inspired by Hayek would argue that it must.”
• In this worldview, facts are less important than markets and individual choice, even “networking “ is about accessing private knowledge. “rumor offers far more potential for profit than published fact..”
• Hayek : competition is a “discovery procedure”
• Karl Popper in The Open Society: falsification matters, so we want people saying untrue things to challenge truth: “However, this philosophy respects no clear distinction between the realm of intellectual competition in that of economic competition… if the value of knowledge lies primarily in the market, then the question is whether a given claim is marketable, not whether it is a valid description of the world”
• ((this reminds me of the obsessive mentions of various entrepreneurs in how they’d become rich again if had to start from the beginning))
• Hayek on intergenerational inequity: there are some socially valuable qualities which will be rarely acquired in a single generation, but which will generally be formed only by the continuous efforts of two or three… Granted this, it would be unreasonable to deny that a society is likely to get better elite if ascent is not limited to one generation, If individuals are not deliberately made to start from the same level.”
• Musk in space; Bezos Amazon as regulator; private defense contractors and prison operators (((my note: these aren’t entrepreneurs these are new sovereigns)))
• “Computers are originally instruments of war, as are the networks that connect them to each other.”
• Ross Ashby: “the brain is not a thinking machine, it is an acting machine “
• Alan Turing and subsequent computer pioneers, such as John von Neumann, indeed solidified the foundational idea that any process, calculation, or pattern can be broken down into discrete, “digital” step-by-step instructions (like the military)
• The Scientific Revolution (roughly 1550–1700) was defined by two distinct technological paths: the open, collaborative sharing of knowledge championed by the Royal Society, and the closed, secretive development of technologies for military gain.
• Bruce Schneider: surveillance is the business model of the internet
• A transition: Old Science of the “gentleman scientist” model (a few people creating knowledge to share) to a decentralized, data-driven ecosystem, accompanied by concerns about the commercialization and monopolization of that knowledge. (186)
• Rob Nixon: climate is “slow violence”
• Antonio Damasio “Descartes Error”: rational and emotional are inseparable
• Nietzche:” to breed an animal that is entitled to make promises… Isn’t that the real problem of human beings?”
• Of the Great Recession “the explosive, albeit very profitable, mistake was to redefine debt as an asset, that is, merely as a source of future income rather than a type of interpersonal bond that endures over time.”
• (Like Hayek wanted, experts were replaced by market indicators of those securitized loans”
• Arlie Russell Hochschild’s research, notably published in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (2016), found that Tea Party members in Louisiana blame the federal government, rather than private businesses (such as the petrochemical industry), for their economic and social decline.
• “Policy makers must rediscover the political capacity to make simple, realistic, and life-changing promises. Either that, or nationalists will show them how it’s done.”