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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022

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Any attempt to project the current political-cultural divide further back than maybe like 1950 at the very earliest always seems like a tortured version of Whig history to me. The idea that the Protestant Reformation was somehow the same movement as the modern movement that supports same-sex marriage and gender theory as core values is so absurd that I'm not even sure how to respond.

I joke with my wife that if Martin Luther could see the churches with his name today he'd have more theses.

Fair enough, I’ll have to spend more time explaining the broad structural forces rather than specific instances.

2000 years is an astonishingly brief period of time, and I don’t think it’s outlandish to suggest that a particular strong societal institution could favour certain subgroups.

The idea that the Protestant Reformation was somehow the same movement as the modern movement that supports same-sex marriage and gender theory as core values is so absurd that I'm not even sure how to respond.

Not the same movement, but caused by similar structural forces.

I would say it is an age old battle between two fundamental desires. On the one hand we want to belong to a strong group and therefore want to act in a way that benefits the group, on the other hand we want to get ahead ourselves even if it hurts the group. Religion and tradition is a way to push people towards group oriented behaviours, aka have children, don't sleep around instead marry young, don't divorce your wife even if she is less hot at age 50 and your secretary wants to bang, what counts is how good you are for the afterlife and not how well you have it currently.

The ideologies that have sprung up in the last centuries have largely been individualist from capitalism claiming that there is no bond between elite and the rest apart from purely contractual agreements, to genderstudies that want to abolish virtues for women while arguing that women should get special privledges. In WWI lots of Barons, millionaires and other high status people died in the trenches, today the individualist elites would flee and would focus on their personal survival. China is building twice as many warships as NATO since the elite in the west tossed their workers under a buss and moved ship production to China, so they could mistreat workers, thereby providing China with the world's premier shipbuilding industry while the west has to build ships by hand as prototypes.

As we have more and more fossil fuels and cheap natural resources harsh group oriented values have been replaced by individualism. For example instead of family first because if you get sick you need your family to provide for you we get genderstudies that promotes personal interests over family with the argument that if you get sick the state or an insurance company will care for you.

The issue is that a society that is entirely individually oriented will be highly corrupt and increasingly dysfunctional, thereby recreating the need for group oriented values.