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Well, the problem is that if you simply go back to the top of the hill, all you can do is slide back down. If liberalism in general doesn’t work, you’re just going to end up exactly where we are now, except that it will be “the future” when it happens, and as you point out the demographics would be much worse than they are now. I am unusual here because after thinking about it, I think the “bad idea” might well have been the enlightenment itself, and certainly by th3 time you have birthright plebiscite you’re just going to speed run chewing through civilization to the bottom where the people who vote have no idea how anything works, no desire to learn, and no stake in making it all work.
Unusual, perhaps, but you're not alone here.
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I've heard this "liberalism doesn't work" idea before, but never really been convinced by it. Equality of opportunity doesn't need to be taken so literally that you toss it all away when one person is born with 1 IQ point less than another. Treat people equally before the law, and generally socially and culturally. Treat people according to the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Most of the "counterarguments" I've heard are that if people are born with different talent or even just different inherited wealth from their parents then this doesn't work because they don't really have equality of opportunity, but... so what? If people are born with different circumstances then equality of opportunity doesn't inevitably lead to equality of outcome and that's okay. Set up a society in which everyone has an opportunity to thrive and carve out a happy healthy life for themselves, and let them sort themselves out. Maybe the 70 IQ person have a small apartment and a job at a fast food place while the 130 IQ person lives in a fancy manor and works at Google. Let them. I don't see how liberalism or the enlightenment prevent this. Instead, it is the regression from this ideal that wokeism represents that is the problem. We went from "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions" to "people should be treated according to their own actions" back to "people of the same skin color should share the blame and credit for each other's actions". Wokeism is explicitly illiberal, not a failing of liberalism.
Are we pursuing equality, where in the case where there's an easily-predictable bimodal distribution of anti-social behaviors, imposing a law grants massive advantages to the group whose anti-social behaviors are less legible?
Or is the goal equity, where we acknowledge that legal equality is, in aggregate, going to create a power imbalance (and thus seek to install guardrails to limit that)?
I strongly disagree.
The entire goal of liberalism is to destroy the fact there's a distribution in the first place. That's why we impose equality before the law when this when the distribution splits across, say, sexes- we subsidize the high-performers in the [in aggregate] less productive sex at the cost of the [in aggregate] more productive one by permitting more mayhem by the low-performers in the [aggregate] less productive sex. Same with race, same with religion, same with everything else that's generally accepted as a consequence of the role of the cosmic dice.
Wokeism is the natural expression of the now-uncontrolled moral hazard created by this regime under the same banner of subsidizing the high-performers in the disadvantaged group (Exhibit A: "women in STEM", used as an excuse to have more women than men going to college for worthless degrees).
That's why the people who have a mind for equity find themselves drifting closer to the traditionalists, who for all their failings at least had a solution to the moral hazard- traditionalism finds itself more compatible with a surviving society by induction, but by its nature cannot inform how a thriving one should behave.
The woke can only be considered explicitly illiberal if they're aware the moral hazard exists and are trying to expand it. (Simply taking advantage of the fact it exists is only illiberal in the fact that the resultant untaxed [social] pollution causes [social] climate change to a point where the average member of society feels that the underlying cause of that pollution must be addressed before it destroys that society's ability to exist.)
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And what happens when a hugely disproportionate percentage of the people ending up with unfavorable outcomes are part of the same racial/cultural population? The ones who also coordinate culturally and politically with each other, and who just happen to all be directly descended from the people who were enslaved, and then after that legally shut out of higher education and positions of power? When those people start to notice this, which they will, do you expect them to take “so what?” as a satisfactory answer as to why no illiberal measures need to be pursued in order to redress their grievances?
I'm not sure what the alternative is. It seems to me like all of the problems with liberalism amount to "what if people try to impose not-liberalism?" Which, sure, difficulty practically implementing a set of ideals is a form of criticism against it. We should try to uphold liberalism, and when people try to tear it down and create unfair and unequal laws and norms we should oppose them and maintain the liberal order. That's how you uphold any order. The solution to "people trying to stop liberalism" certainly isn't "voluntarily stop liberalism", that's just surrendering immediately.
And even if you make some other order, it doesn't escape "what if people complain" unless you suppress them somehow, like if the alternative is "uphold a brutal dictatorship where we genocide anyone who opposes our regime" which tries to prevent dissidents from organizing that way. But that seems like a bad society that I don't want to live in, even if the dictator happens to share my skin tone.
But the problem is that any ideology or system of government has to survive contact with actually-existing human beings. People are telling you that the problem with liberalism is that it requires a population that is pretty much 100% virtuous, and you’re saying, “Well, that’s a problem with people, not with liberalism!” But of course liberalism is (ostensibly) designed to govern humans! Not angels.
So, if our historical experience with liberalism has (for the sake of argument) shown us that liberalism is particularly vulnerable to manipulation by coordinated illiberal campaigning by groups claiming victimhood, that is actually potentially a major flaw in the system as designed.* Your system has to have sophisticated ways built-in to identify when such a thing is happening and to muster resources in a coordinated way to prevent it. And if one of liberalism’s central flaws is that it makes it difficult for a government to do that (because it assumes everyone will act like rational individuals maximizing their own well-being, and it in turn seeks to give them the maximal freedom to do so) then it seems like zealous supporters of liberalism are simply resigned to the fact that their society will go through period cycles of the same pattern, without a way to stop it. (Because to do so would be illiberal.)
Liberalism is just an abstraction, created by specific people at a specific time. It’s not imbued with some divine essence that makes it the best of all possible models for society. If it has serious flaws and failure modes which keep recurring, that seems to be a good reason to reassess it with a critical eye. If liberalism is proving unequipped to deal effectively with the specific issues facing a specific population, then why is it so bad to consider replacing it with another model which might be better for the historical and political moment in which we actually find ourselves?
The alternative, of course, is finding some way to actually alter humans in a comprehensive way such that they become more suitable citizens for a liberal government. One could point to eugenics (coercive or otherwise), mass cultural reprogramming via media and censorship, or mass incarceration of criminals. But, of course, those would all be illiberal means in order to remake humanity in liberalism’s image — and I know that many devoted acolytes of liberalism such as yourself will balk at them for this reason.
These are some good points, and I notice some parallels to arguments against Communism that I definitely agree with when applied there. If your thing can't be implemented then it's pointless to try, as the expected value of trying is equal to the weighted sum of the outcomes that probabilistically occur. But I'm slightly more skeptical when applied here, mostly because we observe the actual historical track record of it and its alternatives. Capitalism when implemented leads to mass prosperity for most people, but also mass inequity (though the poor tend to be much richer than they were before the new development), while Communism leads to genocide and mass poverty (and also moderate inequity).
Meanwhile, liberalism seems to mostly work most of the time, with comparatively manageable bugs. For hundreds of years since the enlightenment, we have (usually) not had wars of Protestants and Catholics murdering each other in the streets. We have mostly not had Jihads and Crusades of Muslims and Christians running around America slaughtering each other en masse. We have mostly not had lynchings and race wars, in the most literal sense of fielding armies with generals and battlefields. Collectivist illiberal violence is measured in the ones or tens instead of the thousands or millions. When you look at illiberal societies like the Nazis or the Colonial Monarchies or all of the Old pre-enlightenment civilizations you see wars and bloodshed and slavery and oppression on huge scales, justified largely on the basis of illiberal intolerance. Almost certainly secretly motivated largely due to economic demand for more land, but morally justified to the people and thus enabled on the basis of intolerance.
I think saying liberalism doesn't work is an overreaction to wokeism as a temporary phenomenon. It's a cancer, but I don't think it's a terminal case. Liberalism as defined by the enlightenment has kind of sort of worked for hundreds of years, gradually getting better and more refined, and most of the things it has caused have improved the world. There are bugs and issues and overreaches that have made things worse, but only in comparison to a hypothetical better liberalism that keeps 90% of its features and discards the 10% bad ones, not some brand new overhauled system that tosses it all away and starts from scratch.
In the end, I think your arguments about practicality work against you here. Hypothetically a totalitarian regime with eugenics, mass cultural reprogramming, mass incarceration etc led by a perfectly benevolent AND perfectly competent god-king who used them for the greater good would be better than what we have now. But in practice trying to implement that would be rolling a d20 and hoping for a nat 20, while all other results will lead to corruption, abuse, and most likely genocide (of the more violent sort, not mere sterilizations). Liberalism's got the better track record here.
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If it's not-liberalism, why does it have such a huge backing from people calling themselves liberals?
Because the entire tactical advantage of wokeism is that instead of the old style of racism, which everyone agrees is bad, it's racism which is really really really good at camouflaging itself. Which means pretending to be "liberals" while condemning the actual liberals who have existed for decades.
I'm afraid you'll step me through that one. What's so good about the camouflage? It seems to consist of saying blatantly racist things, and screaming until anyone who objects gets fired.
I thought it was something more like centuries?
I'm not entirely sure, I'm mostly making this claim on the basis of observation. A lot of people are convinced by it, therefore by definition it is very convincing. I don't think I fully understand it, but I think a large part of it is a mastery of Motte and Bailey tactics. There's a subset of aggressive lunatics who use fully woke ideas to cancel people and commit violence, a subset of humanities academics and mainstream media who are really good at manipulating language and public consensus who launder woke ideas as liberal ideas, a large subset of moderates who think mostly reasonable liberal thoughts but don't think very hard and believe the laundered ideas. And there's also a complementary set of classical racists and sexists who get outraged at all of the woke ideas but voice their outrage in very awful ways so the media have a scapegoat to point at. Whenever the woke do something outrageous the more principled liberals and the racists both get upset, and the media can just point at the latter as examples of people being upset at wokeism.
I'm not entirely sure why wokeism in particular is so good at this as opposed to any other movement in the present or past. Maybe it is a unique failing of liberalism that allows for this exploit. "Pretend to be tolerant and falsely portray your enemies as intolerant so you can justify your intolerance against them" only works in a society that values tolerance. But if we generalize it further, maybe it's not so unique. The camouflage of "Pretend to be X which is seen as good so you can tarnish your opponents as not-X and therefore evil, even if they're actually more X than you" is a strategy that has been tried and worked many times in the past. Inquisitions allowed evil and cruel people pretending to be good Christians to persecute and do very un-Christian things to people they didn't like. The Red Scare allowed people to accuse others of being communists do very authoritarian and un-American things to people they didn't like. The Pharisees pretended to be good Jewish followers of God and persecute people they didn't like. The esteem given to the Catholic Priesthood allowed pedophiles to slip in and molest children, relying on the high esteem to keep them above question. Any time you have a class of people generally considered "good", bad people will want to camoflage themselves under that label to avoid criticism for their misbehavior. So wokeism might just be the most recent example of this succeeding. But I call it really really good at it because unlike some examples (like the Catholic Priest one), it can get called out and noticed for what it's doing and still get away with it by opposing its detractors directly instead of merely relying on stealth alone. You can point out exactly what they're doing and how, a moderate but naive liberal can read literally everything I just wrote and still not really believe what's going on because it's complicated enough that they either don't understand or are not convinced by the evidence. For some reason. I'm don't fully understand it myself because from my perspective it's clear. But it's not merely a lack of intelligence, because lots of smart people are similarly unconvinced. Whatever the woke are doing, it works to convince lots of people, otherwise it would not have gotten away with so much for so long, it would have died shortly after people noticed.
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My rejoinder to that is how do you keep “equality before the law” and “judgement by content of character” and meritocracy? That’s where it all started. How do you keep untalented people who just happen to be minorities from crying “discrimination” when they’re passed over for promotion or don’t get into the college they want to etc.? How do you keep the government run by politicians running for office from turning directly to the racial spoils system and promising all kinds of set asides, promising to appoint a given group into high positions? How do you prevent those given high positions in government using that power to help their communities?
The seeds of such things are planted in the ideas of the liberal enlightenment. As is the eventual triumph of Islam, a religion that’s riding our religious neutrality straight to domination by the simple ploy of demanding we live up to religious tolerance while not giving us the same because they don’t actually believe kin that. I’m expecting Shariah to come to government Europe within a generation simply because secular state atheism coupled with liberal tolerance gives the west zero immune system for an ideology that uses their liberalism against them.
It requires belief in oneself, a firm hand, and commitment to the ideal.
You don't prevent them from crying discrimination. They're allowed to speak. And then you investigate in a fair and unbiased manner that neither privileges them nor disprivileges them in comparison to other races, and upon finding a lack of discrimination you dismiss the matter. If they keep whining you ignore them. They're allowed to whine, you're allowed to ignore their whining. Same way the law does when white people whine now. There are no exceptions to the rules.
In principle, you continue to hold to the ideals. Racial spoils are discriminatory and racist. Don't do that. In practice, it seems hard, but no harder than it would be in any other kind of system. How do you prevent the pre-enlightenment government from doing the same to their preferred demographic? I'm not sure how pointing to a flaw where the current system is being illiberal and say "see, liberalism doesn't work". Obviously we need more color-blindness not less. There are no exceptions to the rules.
Islam is especially illiberal and discriminatory and bad. The solution is to call them out and push them back instead of treating them as special victims who can do no wrong. Liberalism doesn't mean never being harsh to anyone, it means being harsh to someone if and only if the content of their character demands it. There are no exceptions to the rules.
The problems with wokeism are the abandonment of liberal ideals, not their continuation. I don't think this was inevitable, I don't think the seeds were planted long ago, and I don't think it's unavoidable. You simply do what liberalism actually says to do and don't be a hypocrite or a grifter. Now in practice convincing and/or forcing other people to go along with this is hard, but no harder than convincing and/or forcing people to go along with anything else that isn't immediately self-serving. So unless your proposed alternative is anarchy or some Randian "everyone act according to their own self interest at all times", it will run into the same problems of people trying to defect and exploit it for personal gain.
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It is not thought, western Europe is like the US where both will have a majority minority birth wise in a few years.
Yes it was, that's why I am a reactionary and the Nick Land called it the dark enlightenment. The problem is not the plebs voting but elites who want more to deconstruct society, families and even your sex life.
The plebs are not at fault here, never were.
The plebs are the legitimacy given so that the deconstruction can take place. And as such they’ve been (mis)educated to accept and even cheer for those things. But I defy anyone who thinks the modern enlightenment regime was a good foundation to imagine those people championing the new order walking through South London at night. Does anyone believe that they’d choose this path for their country? But by dismantling the authorities of their age, they did set us on that path.
Secularism is essentially state atheism as taught and practiced. The state accepts no religion as True, thus all become equally false and thus, starting in elite circles, fewer and fewer take any of it seriously, not only removing all the restraints of moral teachings, but the immune systems against worse ideologies, be they communist or Islamic or other cults.
The ability for people to worm into power but without responsibility means that looting is the order of the day. Often this is done by promising the plebs that some new social arrangements will make them better off, then pocketing the majority of the money. Or they’ll take money needed to repair infrastructure and not fix it.
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