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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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Liberalism was built by and for 130-IQ Anglos, which leaves me wondering why you think the rest of the world will be as passionate about muh Social Contract. It was created as a post-hoc rationalization for their own political and imperial and separatist ambitions. Muh Social Contract and "inalienable rights" are nothing except noble lies they made to justify their own expansion of power. It's not suitable for the Globalist Age foremost because it's not true, and secondly, like you said, it was made by and for them, not for a Globalist Age.

Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.

Liberal values are the greatest opponent to eugenics, this should be obvious.

Can you explain? It is not obvious to me. Though that might be due to me confusing "Liberal Values" for "Values that are Liberal" such as morphological freedom.

So, my model for this is post-war Japan. The American military occupied the country, wrote a constitution for it based on liberalism (but adapted somewhat to meet the local culture where it was) and then said, “You might hate this now and see it as a foreign imposition, but wait and see what results it will produce for your country.” And what do you know, Japan became one of the leading lights of the world. They had the legal and political forms of liberal democracy, undergirded by a cultural and religious substrate of traditionalist communitarianism. It seems like they really got the best of both worlds. This couldn’t have happened without them being defeated and subjugated by liberal powers. And it allowed them to develop a relationship with America wherein, while they are undeniably a junior partner, they can compete on a genuine peer basis with America in many respects.

This seems like the model that can be productively imposed on many of the other countries of the world. They will hate it at first, their citizens will rebel, they will be manifestly unprepared for and unworthy of liberalism. But in time, when it turns out that their governments actually work and aren’t just rapacious machines designed to rape and exploit their citizens, their descendants will grow to appreciate it.

Now, of course, I see the weaknesses of the model. Sure, it worked in Japan, but it worked because the Japanese are themselves an extremely industrious and high-IQ population, and also because they basically did not have a choice but to accept their subjugation. We’ve seen more recent examples of what happens when countries resist their vassalage by America, and it doesn’t seem like America has the stomach to see the process through to the end anymore. The imperial/colonial powers of the Age of Exploration had a massive surplus of ambitious and restless young men who could be mobilized toward the subjugation of the world; the countries of the modern West have declining and demoralized populations. We can’t stomach the casualties or the optics of what real Muscular Liberalism would look like in practice; this is why the Neocons have been so soundly repudiated.

What would be needed, then, is both a new animating ideology/spirit, and an acceleration of the automation and de-personalization of war. A form of military and economic dominance that doesn’t reward a country for having a surplus of militant young men, and which doesn’t require the mass spilling of the blood of First Worlders. I believe that the new animating spirit will necessarily be based on some form of liberalism. We don’t have any other realistic options. It can be a revitalized, syncretized liberalism, in the same way that post-Renaissance Christianity was strengthened by its reconciliation with Hellenism, but it’s not going to be based on a repudiation of Globalist Liberal principles. We have to make the best of that.

It’s not so simple. Japan was already modernising: the period between the end of the shogunate and WW2 is basically Japan speed-running the Enlightenment. The Americans made the very sensible choice to avoid provoking excess resentment by leaving Emperor Hirohito alive and allowing them to preserve many of their existing traditions in new forms: ken-jutsu (an art of war) became ken-do (a school sport), and so on. So they didn’t feel they were losing more than they had already lost by adopting American ways.

Beyond that, much of Japan’s liberalisation is potemkin - the same party has been in charge for the vast majority of the last seventy years, the police has very broad discretion and prosecution will rubber-stamp anything they do.

The Japanese mostly copied America because America looked worth copying: it was huge and rich and advanced, and everything Japan felt it out to be. Plus the road of imperial conquest was now closed to them, so they chose the next best option.

The main thing that has changed is that liberal countries are no longer unquestionably worth imitating. Europe is increasingly poor despite being liberal, China is increasingly rich despite being culturally illiberal.

EDIT: interesting, completely the opposite perspective from @MaiqTheTrue

The problem of course being that modern Global Liberals have long since lost the will to do what was done in Japan even if it would work. The project was basically taking a feudalist society turned Empire with no real history of democratic institutions and zero concept of the idea of human rights and rebirth a new country and a nearly completely new culture from the ashes of what the culture of Japan was before Nagasaki.

They took over everything, confiscated weapons larger than a kitchen knife, banned large swathes of Japanese culture (shogi was nearly banned because it was a war-game. It survived because those defending it managed to convince the occupation forces that Shogi is democratic because even a pawn can become a king). The school system was fully controlled for a generation.

Compare that to the occupation of Afghanistan. We didn’t even try to curb the worst parts of Islam, we didn’t ban weapons. We certainly didn’t impose a modern, Western educational system on Afghanistan. Basically, they could keep everything backwards about Islamic culture.