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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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That's a real problem when new job categories appear or old ones vastly shrink. I mean, my father was a computer programmer, but nobody in his father's generation was. And the 2500 or so ditch-diggers who built the Delaware Canal... well, their descendants would have been out of luck thanks to Caterpillar.

It’s not like there’s a permanent prohibition on changing jobs, or even that highly capable and ambitious individuals can’t make their own luck - that’s always been the case. In 1650 it was hardly unheard of that a blacksmith might not be the son of a blacksmith; perhaps one required an extra apprentice and took on a boy from the village, or an orphan. Jobs were still created and destroyed. But the presumption of ‘career choice’ didn’t really exist, even for the urban artisanal and nascent middle classes.

Even if we wanted to sort most efficiently (something I would oppose for many reasons), we would be better just giving everyone an IQ test and sorting them into a future profession aged 10 and being done with it.

How can you not select for efficiency and not be defeated by an enemy that selects for efficiency unless we all agree to not be efficient which is a classic case of a molochian trap? Unless you don't think being defeated in the long-term is a big deal?

Maybe you think it would be "efficient enough" I guess?

Hear me out, you could group jobs into categories by the mental requirements, which would also allow associative mating between professions with similar skills.

Even better, you could have dress codes for the different castes to reinforce the division. And you could solve the rapid scaling problem by growing babies quickly in hatcheries.

It would be a world of Community, Identity, and Stability

Right, this is where it once again becomes clear that Huxley utterly failed to write an actually dystopian world, and had to resort to the cheap tactic of making things gratuitously and unnecessarily ugly to make sure readers understand that the Brave New World is supposed to be bad, actually.

You have it backwards, he was writing his utopia and had to cover it up with the thinnest veneer of criticism, so people don't show up at his door with torches and pitchforks.

I love you man, but you're never beating the closeted leftist allegations

At this point I no longer care whether people think I’m right-wing enough. As this recent post of mine probably makes clear, I’m getting increasing disillusioned with a number of trends that I see congealing on what passes for the “intellectual Right” these days, and I’m searching for a sphere that’s far more akin to the early-20th-century “Progressive” intellectual movements that inspired works like Brave New World. Thinkers who had a profound optimism about humanity and technology, instead of the dour, overly-cautious naysaying of the Christian conservative right - a movement I’ve explicitly distanced myself from many times. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m a techno-optimist who wants to live in a hyper-modern mega-city on Mars surrounded by effete Hapa urbanite aesthetes, because I’ve said that openly more than once.

Authleft and authright are always going to have more in common with each other in certain ways than with many small-l liberal ideologies.

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