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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   32019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Great! You start. What do you like about America as it now exists?

There's something a little funny about this depressing rant about how negatively-biased navel-gazing intellectuals have demoralized America with their depressing rants. "The Root Cause of all the bad things happening is our demoralization, and the Root Cause of our demoralization is everyone going around pointing out the Root Causes of how bad things are!"

The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible.

To this list I would add earlier examples: the War on Drugs. They won, and there was never any serious chance of any other outcome. No serious effort was ever made to achieve victory, or even to define victory in a way that was achievable. Enforcement was always somewhere between haphazard and hopelessly arbitrary. At no point, even at the height of mass incarceration, did upper class degenerates succeed in giving everyone the impression that they didn't want or couldn't get drugs. Spreading Democracy, I grew up with it understood that this was part of America's mission in the world, then at some point we just kind of gave up on it. Iraq was part of the problem, but worse than that was coming to accept China's totalitarianism wasn't going anywhere. We just kinda gave up on these goals, like the War on Poverty, the effort to spread capitalist prosperity, environmentalism, space exploration. They seemed to just fizzle out.

As for solutions? I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job:

At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

Americans need a hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being brings comfort to all. Who you want to put at the top, and who at the bottom, is less important than that everyone needs to feel that their status can be raised above someone else's through their efforts. In my mind, the problem of so many NEETs is that when hitting on a girl, one is almost better off being unemployed and a charming slacker or daring criminal, than saying one works an entry level job at Amazon or McDonald's or wheeling dirt around a construction site. Work doesn't seem like it will significantly increase one's status. This is why things like exercise are such red-pilling experiences for so many men: they combine natural and inevitable hierarchy (someone is faster than you and someone is slower), and change in that status from one's own efforts (you move up or down in the hierarchy). We have to eliminate the sense of learned helplessness.

I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job

Totally unrelated, but it is always great to find a fellow Christopher Moore fan. He is probably the best comedic author after Pratchett and is criminally underappreciated.

No kidding! I LOVED him as a teenager, I actually drove to a college in New Jersey with my mother when Fool came out to watch him stage a live reading with the college Shakespeare company, they'd do scenes from Fool juxtaposed with King Lear. I keep meaning to do reread Lamb to do a write up here.

Lamb is his masterpiece. To make a die hard atheist like me to think "This is the jesus I would like to know better" is quite an achievement.

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