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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   27638 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024

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My metaphor for that is from one sci-fi horror fiction. Kill everybody who could have even heard the word woke, that's the only way to rid of it. I'd gladly finish with myself if I had the means to ensure every other death.

I feel like this is the memetics equivalent of great-man historical theories, this idea that ideas just pop into the zeitgeist via random recombination, and if we could just prevent the bad ones we'd all be doing great. I think it's more likely that ideas like wokeness are inevitable outgrowths of previous conditions like any other historical force or event; you might kill every wokie, but if society and its infosphere are primed for wokeness, it'll just pop right back out.

This is almost certainly at least partially correct, imho. Not suggesting that ideas don't have potency (they clearly do, you can trace the intellectual origins of almost any thing back for hundreds of years) but I think that "material conditions" matter a lot more than just some guy having an idea.

One of the interesting things you'll note historically is that most powerful ideas (e.g. Darwinism) aren't (entirely, anyway) original, they keep popping up time and time again until something happens that seems to make them stick. It seems pretty plausible that it's circumstances more than personality (at least in many cases) that causes the "sticking" to occur.

I imagine the servicemen in that world raised similar arguments to their more strong-willed comrades. In any event, genetical and cultural changes after such a purge would make the conditions not at all similar to the present world.

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