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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Why are we so afraid of the likelihood that we are every bit as bizarre as the quantum world; that we possess fantastic capacities that we have so far only allowed ourselves to imagine in science fiction and fantasy literature?

Because it's bullshit.

Because if through I dunno, extreme sensations you could tap into supernatural abilities, people would be doing it all the time. Various cultures routinely subjected their own to transcendentally painful initiation experiences. I recall others but this is the one I remember most.

Any tribe that tapped into something like that and got a useful ability out of it would have kept doing it, and this would have given them an edge and spread. We've got 40,000 years of essentially modern human tribes existing all over the planet yet no useful custom of this type appeared.

Meanwhile, the useful custom of marriage was a human universal until very recently.