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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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I think that most forms of culture war are specific extensions of the desire that most organisms have, to alter the environment so that they and others like them can more easily thrive. (I apologize that my comment is mostly tangential to the question you are asking...)

An example from nature: when two males fight over a female, it stresses out both of them, but so long as at least one male is confident that his survival benefits from that stress, there will always be a male willing to create this type of stress for other males.

-One of my theses in life is that most people are world-class at lying to themselves. (And then there's a separate group that aren't lying to themselves, but they are good at lying to others. But I think the first group is largest, partly because the people that are best at lying to themselves are often best at lying to others.)

I think it is fairly common that people are actually warring against others, trying to hurt them, but they are using a "noble" motive to rationalize (to themselves and to others) their harms towards other people. The desire to stress out others is usually subconscious, not conscious.

And precisely because they are harming others, their rationalization instinct is strongest.

-One general way to purposefully harm others is that if there is something which stresses someone out less than it stresses out other people, then it can make sense to try to increase that thing. They and their progeny will then be likely to gain a survival advantage relative to everyone else (but it must be a tolerable stress, if they don't survive the stress then it's not worth it).

But it helps to rationalize the harm they are doing, to protect their own self-concepts & to protect their social status. If you see yourself as the villain, and everyone else sees you as a villain, the strategy will usually backfire.

If people like Eisenman are fundamentally more comfortable with disharmony (ironically, they themselves being more in harmony with "disharmony"), then inflicting it on other people will give them a relative survival advantage over others. Eisenman might have rationalizations for why his architecture style is good for society on net, but I think it's entirely possible that it's just an unconscious self-preservation lie.

Some possible examples of the phenomenon of people stressing out others more than they themselves are stressed out:

-People that tolerate or enjoy graffiti might use graffiti to drive out the people that don't like graffiti.

-Online trolls tend to be comfortable with the overall trolling dynamic, so it can be a useful way to take over a community, as it drives off all of the people that aren't comfortable with the trolling dynamic.

-Using gunshot noises to reduce crowding and reduce rents (hopefully just apocryphal, but it would probably work in reality) https://www.quora.com/Can-I-lower-rent-in-my-neighborhood-by-shooting-blanks-and-playing-guttural-screams-from-loud-speakers-in-the-middle-of-the-night-at-least-3-times-a-week-The-rent-here-is-too-damn-high-please-I-am-desperate-for-more

-Using bureaucracy, red tape, and legalese to make life more difficult for most other people, but easier for you (if you are relatively better at dealing with such environments)

-Some people are just generally better at thriving in societies with an excess of laws and rules, and these people often have no real interest in helping other people to be free of excess regulations.

-Some people thrive in societies in which there are lots of vices present. They are relatively immune to the vices (gambling, alcohol, drugs, credit cards, etc), and can instead profit off of exploiting the more easily tempted nature of others.

-My general impression is that some of the people that care the least about environmental pollution are, for genetic reasons or lifestyle reasons, relatively more immune to the negative effects of pollution. Not totally immune, but more immune. And it seems like some of these pollution-resilient people end up being weirdly tolerant and even eager to increase pollution. It is hard for environmentalists to overcome this phenomenon.

-Some people are very good at self-censoring what they say. So even if they don't agree with the censorship, they may go along with it, since the censorship creates a more hostile environment for the competition. (I'm willing to bet that a decent chunk of men in academia are functionally misogynistic to some degree, but if they can reliably censor that, they might be supportive of rules and norms which drive out the men that are bad at self-censorship, since that leaves more women & jobs for the men that are good at self-censorship.)

I appreciate your comment a great deal. I considered this angle as well. Eisenman speaks to it in the talk. He does not say that he seeks a harmony which happens to be diametrically opposed to Alexander's view of harmony. Eisenman makes clear that he specifically seeks disharmony. The buildings he designs are not beautiful and useful, but only to socialists. They are equally horrible and dysfunctional and painful to socialists as well.

I think this is the reason that Shafarevich concludes socialism is ultimately a sort of complex behavior of suicide. The goals they seek are ultimately terminal to themselves. Indeed, remaking man (in the literal physical, biological sense) such that he can only survive under socialist conditions has been a frequent goal of socialist groups. See 'new socialist man' or 'new soviet man.'

That said, I am out of my evolutionary-biological depth at this point. I suppose you could posit a selection mechanism that is selecting only for a group to pass on its genes, and those genes happen to be ones that derive pleasure from anti-harmony. But, I don't think group selection of this type is necessarily proven out; I think it is individual selection all the way down, with group selection as more of a second order phenomenon. I think, But like I said, I'm out of my depth here.