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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 2, 2024

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I'd like to point out that your example is misleading. Math has advanced over time, and all inhuman things advance over time. But all human things simply do not. This is why the Tao Te Ching and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius still hold up today. Most wisdom does not seem to advance over time.

Some truths are universal. "For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away". This is still true today. Feedback loops makes it easier to get more the more of something you have. If you are intelligent enough, you can see truths like this, even if they won't be named or made into concrete concepts for another 500 years.

Now, I haven't read Marx, and while I don't know if his ideas were wrong, I think he was wrong as a person. His work is a reflection of who he is, and the attempt to legitimize his own values and ideals. But even if his theory is largely correct, one cannot prove values. There's one more factor which complicates matters further, it's that at the high ends of intelligence, a slight difference in beliefs can lead to vastly different conclusions. Jordan Peterson, Nietzsche, and Jung agreed on a lot of things, but their takes on religion and human life are very different.