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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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Is evolution and change in life only valid when it's supposed to help procreation?

Yes. Survival is the terminal goal of all life. Existence has to be sustained or it stops.

what is the point of art, or enjoying life

In material terms the reason for all these behaviors is procreation and facilitation thereof. How art in particular does so is a deep topic (my take is that it is the best way to communicate predictive heuristics), but ultimately it still serves that purpose or is a temporary waste of energy.

You can of course imagine that this is or isn't the "point", but that's entirely immaterial to why it exists.

Is changing our gender roles actually enough to make us die out as a species, and be outcompeted?

Given all (modulo a handful of contested sociologist fakes) known human societies prior to modernity shared them, it's unknown if human societies are sustainable at all without. The trends in birth rates in the modern Western experiment make me skeptical that this can be achieved.

if procreation is so important then why do so many people not want to procreate? I think you are just projecting your opinion on everyone else and think they are misguided if they don't act accordingly.

What people want or claim to want is completely irrelevant to the sustainability of their actual behavior.

If you don't do what is necessary to keep existing you stop doing so. The popularity or ethics of suicide do not change this reality. Antinatalism is doomed to irrelevance by construction.

Note that none of these claims are normative. I haven't even expressed my "opinion" on this matter.

Birthrate trends are probably selecting the middle classes of modern countries for clannishness, natality, and dogmatism, and the underclasses for impulsivity and promiscuity, in part due to the breakdown in gender roles. Feel like it should be pointed out as a side effect.