This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
[tag:rant]
The interesting part is the apparent absence of calls to slow down. The window dressing is diverse, but the Overton Window for issues pertaining to the Culture War is all left of zero point. The subject of discussion is how many Stalins we need – maybe 50, maybe just 1.5, and how exactly to implement their will; from repelling Christian counterattacks to «why can't we just do it, you know?».
Yet we cannot say that the entire set of speakers has the same end state in mind. Some are as utopian as radicals a century ago; some seem to believe the status quo is 95% perfect. Clinton'2001 and probably Obama'2008 would have been canceled today, because their desirable end states were to the right of the rightmost edge of the window. But they aren't invited, or perhaps aren't interested. It so happens that the kind of people who come either know in advance how the window will have crept, or come to learn from its movement and update. The «consensus of elites» is thus not a static thing, nor chaotic, but a comprehensive message continually updated in the same direction. People are very sensibly interested in reasons and forces that canalize those updates.
@2rafa brings up a hypothetical convent of racist, colonialist 19th century elites. Would it count as a conspiracy? Probably not. At the same time, isn't it interesting how such a convent is unthinkable today, and the same social classes have dedicated their energies to combating homophobia in Singapore? Did some new evidence convince them to rally under the LGBTQ+ banner? Or was it moral progress, late Enlightenment unfolding in accord with its inner logic? But that logic is made of people's choices. So what guides those choices?
Whenever I see her push back on plebeian notions of conspiracy, I'm reminded of David Foster Wallace's parable. What we call conspiracy is not a secret organization but the liquid form of power: the process of like-minded people using significant information, coordination, prestige and status advantage to steer the society towards preferred outcomes, using a toolset which focuses on furthering those advantages. Plebeians live in the desert like moloch (lizard); they know power by clouds in the sky, morning dew, those occasional stray drops that evaporate on the rocks, by rain that rapidly flows down the layers of sand; or at most by tales of their forefathers about that one time they've seen a puddle. So their armchair theories about behavior of its large bodies, no matter how clever, are fantastical and laughable to more knowledgeable beings. 2rafa is a thoroughbred aquatic being: she navigates torrents and feels at peace looking down into the abyss. But for her, power is just... the way the world is. Huh? What do you mean «tsunami»? For that matter, what is a «puddle»? We'd benefit from having some littoral animals who have a more balanced frame of reference.
Of course, the desert is only metaphorical. We can watch WEF streams these days – no secrecy. No smoke-filled rooms or dreadful caves, cackling, twirling of facial hair, classified documents, decrees of infallible elders, certainly no conscious malice. What there is, is an intellectual and ethical monoculture, a set of null hypotheses, a shared sensibility as to which topics are not interesting and low-status, which call for proactive enthusiasm, and on how to fit new talking points into the old program, iterating it for another Agenda-{year}.
It's richer and more complex, but not that different from any other echo chamber. Except it's not a debate club, these people do have the authority to just order the little people to do things. And they will be obeyed, not only for obvious reasons but because it is human nature to habitually obey, and because there's Respectable Consensus backing them up. Maybe the little people will even volunteer – after all, Moldbug says consensus flows through the elites in a bottom-up manner, or rather medium-up. Maybe. It sure is interesting where its real inflection points lie. We know that, at least, some elite social movements – and clubs, and Societies, like the Fabian one – have claimed being those.
I think Sensibility is a good way to put it.
There have been several iterations of the «Globalist»/World Government Sensibility, with WEF becoming, in stereotypes and to some large extent in reality, the public face of the contemporary one. It seems that at some point around the Russian Revolution they have gotten integrated with the Social-Democratic Sensibility and the Liberation Sensibility, which began with successes of the Feminist movement. Let's focus here. Skipping minor details: after Women were processed into an Identity and a political block and propped up to their victory (a sequence of victories, beyond expectations of the first generation of feminists), it was the turn of American Blacks, Gays, and now the LGBTQ abbreviation is being vindicated with Trans Wars and the principle is generalized and franchised. In all cases there are early goals justifiable by commoner morality; then, slippery slope and divergence, with the group-identity becoming attuned to the whole Sensibility package.
There are various critiques of those projects. Conservatives gesture at the fraying of social tissue, discrediting of family unit, pitching sex against sex, race against race, loss of common decency, you know it. Reactionaries agree, and explain those negative outcomes with appeals to fundamental inequality of human groups and the natural order.
I don't care much about this stuff. The underappreciated problem I have with this Sensibility is that it's the sensibility of the managerial class. Of those snake oil salesmen who think reality is downstream of their Powerpoint slides. Progressive ideology aside, they have some catastrophic habits of mind for rulers, chiefly: belief in faking it till you make it, and habit for sidelining those who point out their fakery and overpromising. This is bad for reasons Scott has outlined in his Parable of Lightning. Crucially, because fighting against being exposed necessitates building a de facto power-maximizing conspiracy. We've seen a toy model of how it works – a puddle – with COVID, both the lab story and countermeasures. But it's pervasive.
At the moment of each successive Identity Liberation, its advocates had to work against the belief that the group in question is somehow flawed and thus undeserving of new rights. Women cannot into rational political decisions, black people are unfit for the polite society, gays are promiscuous immoral perverts whose perversion is contagious, queers/transsexuals are mentally ill fetishists (and sex pests). Invariably, the argument was that it might look this way now, but after some adjustment period – maybe with compensation for past iniquities – demerits would go away. Anything a man can do a woman will learn to do just as well, affirmative action will be unnecessary in a generation, gay men will go marry each other, transsexuals will get mentally well without all the abuse. Invariably, this doesn't come quite true for the group as a whole, and there remains at least a fraction of stereotypic bad actors who personify all concerns of retrogrades and exploit new rules. Nth wave feminism misandrists, antisocial blacks, sex-obsessed AIDS evangelists in bathhouses, psychotic and predatory AGP "troons" from 4chan memes. Shortcomings of the group as a whole are problem enough, but these guys get weaponized by the outgroup – as evidence that those promises were bullshit.
A reaction of a PMC when you poke holes in his presentation at is to double down. I can see three particularly harmful kinds of doubling down.
The first is to reflect the charge, accuse the outgroup of getting in the way of closing the gaps, maybe even provoking those unfortunate extremes with their bigotry.
The second is to flip the table, saying that your standard of goodness itself is obsolete – those gays are just ahead of the curve, poly/open relationships are all the rage, nobody needs family and monogamy and of course religion (conservatives understandably suspect this was the plan all along, and can point to early socialism as evidence).
The third is to deny the charge. This sounds toothless, but it's the worst kind. There are no brakes on the denial train. You start with FBI statistics, then you have to deboonk SAT, then people must be deceived about the physiology of body odor, oops databases critical for medical research are closed off; soon enough you warn of the dangers of critical thinking, and absolute trash science on an unrelated topic is accepted because the whole institution is now running on Stone Age taboos and mass hysterias and you need to chase down heretics overseas! And by the way Damore asked for it! And of course there's NOTHING to Blanchardism– nor any costs to shoehorning teenagers and the very concept of gender into its negation...
Every one of those liberation projects has inflicted compounding damage on our ability to reason and find working solutions in general, because of the unwillingness of its proponents to admit they have been faking it on specific points. And places like WEF is where they coordinate the message on which to double down – like that Media leader asking for specifics.
It's a public key conspiracy, with the private key being their Powerpoint-class identity and the shared sensibility of people who would rather change the world than admit failure before the plebs. Without this key, and in the context of external reality, their actions look incomprehensible or
or?
Or evil.
The site truncated my post and I just missed it. Thanks
More options
Context Copy link
First they got Dugin ('s daughter), and now this...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link