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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   25748 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.

Sure, you can always blame the parents but that's also part of what I'm talking about when I say that "the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families". You see, I actually agree with you that having kids is inherently "unsafe", and therein lies the rub. Because if there's anything in the world that the modal secular blue/grey-tribemember seems desperate to avoid, it is personal risk, or more pointedly blame.

I believe this aversion is at the root of many modern pathologies including the seeming death of the adult. That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.

Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.

having kids is inherently "unsafe"

Used to be the opposite. Not having kids was how to be unsafe. Kids were your safety net.

You're not wrong.

Isn't this death of the adult the same as described downthread here https://www.themotte.org/post/1199/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/257235?context=8#context

By

@jeroboam as

government competency crisis

And

@Capital_Room as

Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity,"

And

@The_Nybbler as

the essence of modern management theory

All describe the same aversion to agency and personal responsibility.

I would say that what @WhiningCoil, @jeroboam, @Capital_Room, @The_Nybbler, Et Al. are describing is the downstream effects of what I am describing. IE the afore mentioned "modern pathologies"

And @Capitol_Room as

It's Capital_Room, with "capital" as in letters, city, or punishment, not "capitol" as in legislative building.

And I'd agree that, yes, these do all point toward the same thing.

I've fixed it.

Sure, you can always blame the parents

Well, and in fairness that's not the complaint I'm answering (or rather, it's the far more complicated version of "protect your kids from hostile social memes" that, unless you have time [and most parents don't], you won't have neither the presence, energy, or finances to combat it correctly- which is part of why parental rights are a dead letter these days, but I digress).

That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.

Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.

Humorously, the people blue tribe love to import have a much healthier relationship with risk than the natives do (risk-taking is obviously selected for when immigration is illegal). And then blues are shocked when their imports won't vote for the party of risk-aversity.

or more pointedly blame

2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing):

First, when blame (and failure) becomes rare, the ability to assign it (or threaten such) becomes a far more powerful force than it otherwise should be relative to the objective risk.

Perhaps, in economic booms, there are very few ways to truly fail, so the ability to properly weight failure is diluted; then, when that boom ends and more ways to fail appear, the people who grew up in the 'too much opportunity to fail' times can't handle weighting risk correctly. After that, if the bust continues for long enough, you'd get another generation passing on that problem, and the negative feedback loop of "too scared to do anything" continues until the next generation has more opportunity than the last.

Second, we did such a good job (in that boom time) engineering all risk (and the human factor in general- WEIRD people automate everything, it's just how we are) out of our systems that when something does blow up, now it's a big deal.

It is, quite literally (on a social level) an allergy to risk; then, when kids are born into a society that has such an allergy that metastasizes into an allergy to blame.

2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing)

These are legit points that I l will have to bring up if/when i get around to writing said effort post.

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