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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Even though they are both describing the same general category of behaviour, the symbolic role that violence plays in their model of the world is radically different. There are many ways to cash out what that means in practice - for one, for Kulak, violence in itself represents a kind of success, a triumph over our sheepish instincts, whereas for the other, violence in itself is a failure, an undesired last resort that always carries a terrible cost. Either way, it means that the worldviews just don't translate into each other neatly. The whole world of moral assumptions around, say, Orestes choosing to engage in retributive violence to avenge his father is invisible and alien to the modern reactionary.

Violence is an extreme example, but I daresay there are similar clashing worldviews in other politics. Probably the one I've run into most often today is the concept of revolution, where even though two people may both be talking about the overthrow and replacement of a particular political establishment, the invisible worlds of assumptions around it are so divergent as to almost untranslatable.