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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   18558 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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I am not Hlynka, but I did debate with and eventually alongside him for years, and as I understood his arguments, I continue to believe he was simply correct in the large majority of them. As a vociferous proponent of what one might term Hlynkism, here is a compilation of discussions that seem to me to be good examples of the core idea that usually gets this label. It's a large chunk of quotes; I recommend collapsing it if it doesn't seem useful.

I think a good place to start is with a simpler question: Of the American Revolution of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789, which hewed closer in practice to the essential spirit of Enlightenment ideology?
These two revolutions occurred a mere 13 years apart. Both societies were heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideology, and consciously sought to recast their social structures according to the precepts of that ideology. On the other hand, the interpretations, implementations, and ultimate outcomes differed vastly between the two. Clearly the divergence was significant, and it seems reasonable to presume that one diverged further from the root ideology than the other. By describing our understanding of that divergence, we can give a clearer picture of what we see as the Enlightenment's core nature, while being kept honest by the historical record of its commonly-accepted champions.

[...]

And yet, I see people who I'm quite confident would not self-ID as white identitarian, people who I would not argue are white identitarian, people who have been democrat-voting progressives most of their lives but who now have grown progressive-sceptical, lamenting that Red Tribers have "wasted" political capital preventing poor black women from aborting their babies, because HBD. I don't believe that perspective is coming out of what people commonly understand as "the Right", and I certainly don't believe it's coming from the zeitgeist of Red Tribe. It's a fundamentally Blue Tribe perspective, a progressive perspective, an Enlightenment perspective. And it's pretty trivial to see how integrating HBD into their worldview got them from a normie-progressive viewpoint to what most normie progressives would consider an abomination without ever leaving the general Progressive worldview-space.

[...]

The core of our disagreement comes down to whether there are practical limits to the exercise of power. You don't seem to believe that such limits exist, or are so distant that they cover all plausibly survivable spaces. I disagree.

[...]

I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.

[The above is part of a longer conversation, which continued in the following thread:]

I believe that "We know how to solve all our problems" is a brief, common-language encapsulation of the core thesis of a specific ideological movement, and that this ideological movement is best understood as the central example of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment this movement did not exist, and post-Enlightenment this movement has been overwhelmingly dominant throughout subsequent history. I think this movement's axioms are both very wrong and very dangerous, and further believe that its dominance is rapidly approaching an end, for reasons directly related to how this movement was formed and how its ideology predetermines its tactics. [...] Compare the phrase "the poor you will always have with you" to the conceptual bundle represented by the declaration of a "war on poverty". One flatly states that the problem of Poverty is unsolvable under mortal conditions. The other assumes that the problem of Poverty can be defeated through coordinated human action, right now and under present conditions.

[...]

Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time. Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.

[...]

"Consent" is necessary but insufficient. That is very different from it "not mattering". You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women, the radfems want fornication with fewer consequences for women and more consequences for men. I think you both are awful for basically identical reasons, and would not willingly live under either of your regimes.

[...]

When you design a better microprocessor, that does not give you or your culture additional moral value. Technological advancement does not, cannot, and never will imply moral value. It doesn't matter if I'm knapping flints and you're building star destroyers: our moral responsibilities to each other remain entirely unaltered. To think otherwise is to fatally misunderstand both morality and technology on an extremely basic level.

[...]

He's putting them in the "left" box for the same reason I put them in the "Enlightenment" box: They're secular materialists who believe that they know how to solve all our problems through the twin powers of meticulous sociopolitical theorycrafting and permanent removal of all the Bad People. They have a number of qualities they share between them, and our argument is that those qualities are vastly more consequential than their differences. These similarities are not a recent development, and go back all the way through the history of hard-left and fascist movements.

[...]

This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.

What do you think of the idea that I floated here? That the fundamental distinction for you and Hlynka, at the end of the day, is between Christians and non-Christians? Is there anything to that, or is it completely baseless?

Although not entirely central, references to religion do recur throughout posts made by you and Hlynka, such as the line I quoted from him, and your reference to "secular materialists" that you just quoted.

Reply posted here

Sorry, just mapping the labyrinth.

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