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It sometimes feels like the biggest inferential distance for me is between the typical motte poster you describe and myself, despite the hugely similar surface level appearances.
I'm on OG motter, I came over as a moderator from the culture war thread on slatestarcodex. You know this, because (for those who don't know) you were there with me.
I'm a systematizer, I liked reading some of Elizer's fictional works, Bryan Caplan has long been an intellectual north star for me, I often dislike getting my hands dirty, I doubt I would have made it through a week of boot camp, and I'd certainly be lost and hopeless in a foreign country etc etc.
Still, I read your posts and I never think "that is me he is talking about". It is like describing to a fish that a fish is creature that swims in water. The fish looks around and sees other fish and thinks "oh those things".
Anyways weird personal feelings aside, or maybe because of them, I feel like I've already grokked these insights you have to bring.
Humans are adaptive. And when we live in a world of systemetizers we shall get good at systemetizing. When we live in a world of multilingualism, multi-businesses, and multi-cons we shall get good at that too.
To a large extent I think the world of academics and systemitizing has not arisen out of anyone or anything's desire for control, but as a natural competitive process among humans. Our big useless brains are peacock feathers. Adaptiveness is hot and sexy, and to be so adaptive that you can waste a bunch of resources on something that is not adaptive is even hotter! The original academics were all bored out of their minds landed aristocrats. Pick almost any philosopher / thinker / scientist from the 17/18/19th century and they were nearly all independently wealthy. Those aristocrats had won the game of life so badly that they had to invent a new game just to keep playing.
The enlightenment was a great accident. A result of man's competitive nature hitting a wall. A wall that meant that the best of them had all sort of won. Or at least couldn't figure out how to clearly win any harder than they already had. The new game they created was enlightenment about the physical world. Eventually they seemed to tire of that game as well, and they went back to killing each other to prove who was best. We ended up with the absolute tragedy of the world wars, and a century of the elites trying to strut their dicks around like fucking cavemen. A tragedy, but a predictable, and expected one.
I think of all the competition in the modern world as a game. Its not really for survival, unless someone chooses to make it about survival (which they often do). And I fully get that I am playing a game, and that it is very different than the struggle that is survival.
It is fathers day. My father has always epitomized a yearning to have that struggle for survival. He joined the army just as the vietnam war was ending. He was disappointed that he wouldn't get to go over and kill the [ethnic slurs]. He loved camping, hiking, cross country running, collecting knives, hunting small game, carpentry, and construction. I use past tense because he is old and does fewer of these things nowadays, and has mellowed out with the copious amounts of marijuana he consumes.
He was always terrible at playing "the game". He always managed to be on the wrong side of office politics anytime there was cleansing. There was always a bitterness he carried through life as he never seemed to understand why he kept losing at the soft things in life.
In contrast, my mother plays politics like a champ. Well enough that I can't always tell if she knows what she is doing, or has just been doing it so long it is second nature. She was nearly in the c-suite at a company that had billions in revenue a year before she retired.
So I get it when guys watch fight club and the matrix get that feeling that the world is fucked up. We are animals damnit! Our instincts and our bodies are not meant for these soft games of politics! We are meant to fight for survival, to truly struggle, and to be beaten by the world not by our fellow people! I get it. I feel the same way.
But I grew up watching my dad yearn for that world that doesn't exist, and I think it broke him hard enough to make me and my brother come out pre-broken. I'm not gonna live wishing for a world that doesn't exist. I've got the world as it is, and I don't plan to be a sucker that loses to the soft men and women of the world. And by being unwilling to lose to them, I have become a soft man myself.
Long rambling to say, we won too hard at the struggle of survival. Now everything is just games of competition, and losing isn't fun.
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