100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
No bio...
User ID: 2039
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20hr ago
making marriage even more exclusive and difficult is going to collapse it further.
Yes, probably, but people will adapt.
Think about the way it worked in the past. If you wanted to have sex, marriage was the only way for most people. In fact, the whole trope of a man promising he loves a woman only to flee the morning after coitus is illustrative of this. If you were sleeping around a lot, as a man or a woman, you were circling the drain, so to speak. After a while, the only people you could have sexual congress with were just as on the margin of society as you were. The obvious exception here is, of course, wealthy / elite men who could engage the services of discreet prostitutes or employ some sort of concubinage on the side.
Then, during the sexual revolution in the west, this changed. You didn't have to promise yourself to your high school sweetheart. You could kind of dog around for at least college, but maybe get wifed/husbanded up right around graduation. But, if we play the tape forward another 50,60 years, we have what we have today; perpetual fuckery (or an utter lack thereof) well into one's 30s.
If we flip the switch back, you'll see a dip in the marriage rate for some time. Then, as a planned and stable marriage becomes more rare it will regain social currency and people will begin to orient themselves towards it. Situationships, polyamory, etc. will be seen as weirdo fringe stuff.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
20hr ago
First off, when you say something like "highly gatekept" you're giving away some of your online habits and, more enjoyable for me, you give me the opportunity to -
YesChad.jpeg.
I absolute want to gatekeep marriage. That's, like, the point, bro. If you don't literally keep the gates you're doubly fucked when the barbarians show up.
All those people in situationships are not going, "I wish there were a death pact contract I could enter with a partner that society and law would force us to respect"
That's hyperbolic and you know it. People in situationships want to get out of them. So much so that "defining the relationship" is literally the next meme after situationship in the meme-chain of modern dating. The problem with that next step is that it isn't actually a true next step. There are plently of memes and funny YouTube videos that illustrate how when one part wants to "define the relationship" the other party swerves and avoids in order to keep the undefined situationship going. And the world continues to burn turn.
You can't just decree from above that some action is to be seen as desirable and have people abide;
I agree completely.
We used to, however, let people make their own decisions and then live by their own consequences. If you didn't want to make a good decision, you totally could! But then, later, you'd have to deal with it. The problem today is that a large part of society that routinely makes good decisions and employs delayed gratification, self-sacrifice, and discipline is actively coerced (via taxes) to subsidizing tens of millions of people who not only make bad decisions but actively defect from a pro-social game.
Let me be clear, I don't want be to be forced to abide any of my personal values system ideas. That would be tyranny. I just want consequences to have actions for everyone. My original comment that gatekept marriage attempted to outline what I think the requirements for making a good marriage decision are. People are free not to abide by that, but they must abide by the consequences.
Good post. It does a good job of clearly stating the problem of R/K selection theory in the context of human beings.
The vast majority of human history is a bunch of elite men getting lots and lots of women pregnant. The problem with this is that once you hit the agrarian revolution, let alone the industrial, the necessities of society at a scale beyond the village means you have to find some sort of social institution to prevent a lot of intra-male mate competition.
Enter marriage.
Marriage is a miracle. It's institution (which is close to a human universal, btw, in any society that's progressed past hunting-gathering) creates a way for males to pacify their natural urge to kill other males as means to guarantee mate access, and also creates a basic economic and social building block. Throw on top of it property and inheritance rights, and you've got yourself the beginnings of something durable.
When the institution of marriage breaks down, you can see what follows. It isn't anything new, it is a de-evolution to our chaotic ancestors' way of mate selection. Does this kind of sound like the modern dating market? Lack of commitment, multiple partners in parallel, "infidelity" beginning to lose all meaning and significance, "situationships" being strategic ambiguity by both men and women to hedge their bets.
I'll dig it up later (if I remember) but I was listening to a podcast where the guest had a great line. Marriage, specifically the wedding, isn't about a public commitment of love to the other person, it's about publicly signaling that both of you are off the market and that you'll abide by all of the laws and norms around marriage - and so should other people! There's no ambiguity. If you sleep with a married man or woman, you're a homewrecker. You should know this because of the publicly displayed wedding band that is visible at all times (and also, you know, that other person should tell you they're married).
But marriage, at least in the west, is utterly meaningless - doubly so for any sort of real legal or social consequences for failing to live up to its requirements. Cheated on your wife? No big deal, there's couples counseling. Or you can just get a divorce. You've been divorced? Who hasn't! It's so easy to do now that you don't even need a reason other than "I guess I just don't like him/her anymore."
And we haven't even got to the wildly out of balance reality of the legal system. If I'm a 34-37 year old male, tall, in good shape, earning a high income, getting married is such a high risk that many lawyers specifically recommend against it. The only exception being a prenuptual agreement that is so stacked against the wife that it becomes quite foolish for her to get married because she'll be in a kind of economic concubinage.
As many others have said, the way to fix this issue - to the extent that it is possible - is through recultivating social esteem. Marriage should be a capital-B Big Deal and should be reserved, frankly, for worthwhile men selected by women with honor and virtue. I'm not going to get all "virgins only" here, but when a retired pornstar marrying some guy isn't scene as laughably retarded, we've got a problem. Marriage should be seen as a goal for the ambitious young man in the same way that starting your own business is - not for the feint of hard, full of needs for sacrifice and hard work, but, ultimately, a quite noteworthy achievement.
Adultery should be a crime. I'd not recommend locking people up for it, but it should be a misdemeanor that is publicly searchable. There has to be real consequences for promiscuity that violets a marriage contract. If you want to sleep around with other unmarried folks, that's fine.
Finally, I don't see how you can re-invigorate marriage in a wholly secular worldview. An important mental shift is in seeing "husband" and "wife" as a distinct and special human role. What are the specific and unique duties a man has to a woman and vice-versa in a marriage. How does one's behavior necessarily change? If these questions aren't answered thoroughly, you devolve to the modern secular marriage; roommates who occasionally sleep together and file taxes together.
To comment on your framing of "alphatize the betas" vs "betatise the alphas" -- the answer can only be to alphatize the betas through a series of verifiable and impossible-to-cheat milestones in life. This traces back to ceremonies and traditions around the journey to manhood. In human history, a woman wouldn't marry a man who couldn't provide food and shelter for her and their likely offspring. Today, marrying an unemployed man or a man with shaky employment stability should be a not starter. Physical fitness matters - fattys need not apply. I think the biggest missing piece is social and community esteem. If a man has literally no friends or has no meaningful community network, he is not marriageable - even if making millions of dollars!
But again, even with the rubric I've just laid out, it doesn't matter unless marriage matters.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
No, I agree with you.
It's like people who write on a computer. Like, what are you even doing? If you aren't sharpening a quill and using ink you sourced locally, you're not writing you're just, I don't know, digital lettering. Ugh. As a true writer, I can't even. People these days are just not at all aware of what it means to scribe.
the mass market version is almost always a watered down, lower quality version of the original.
This is wrong. It's an infinitely better product because it's convenient, cheap, and tastes good unless you've retardmaxxed your tastebuds for no other reason that snobbish elitism.
Industrial strength coffee won WW2 and got us to the fuckin' moon before the Russians.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Capitalism is an economic system, not a social or political one.
It's embedded with the politics and culture of whatever society under examination.
If you have a problem, you have a problem with the culture. You could fight about it in a kind of culture ... war.
But capitalism isn't the problem. You're committing and obvious, to the point of intentional, category error.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism
That's not how capitalism works. Free market exchange is inherently positive sum. When it becomes zero sum and / or rent-seeking, that means a market distortion (usually regulation) is to blame.
You and I often disagree, but your discourse is mostly of a far higher quality than smooth brained reddit "lulz late stage capitalism" tripe. Perhaps I caught you on an off day - you're also arguing strenuously that people replicate a subculture that selects for some of the worst physiognomy out there.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Yeah, actually, this does make more sense. I think you're right.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
But you see what you've done, right? You've introduced a new method for building status -- wealth.
A couple Haredi start working at the AMZN warehouses and one of them gets promoted one day. He's now going to enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status with his male peers and, because of that, a choice of mates. Soon, all the other Haredi start competing for status via wealth games instead of Torah study and fertility games and, boom, you've got modernism.
The lack of work is intentional, not a weird outcome of degeneracy in this case. And this is the critical issue with pretty much all hardcore RadTrad visions of society -- they actually kind of glorify poverty.
Remember, I'm saying this as a Latin Mass TradCath myself. As much as I really do hate modernism, I also hate material, non-self assigned poverty (i.e. Monks don't count). Deprivation is bad all up and down the stack. Those without means don't suddenly become spiritually wealthy (again, setting aside those that make the willful decision to do that like Monks). Mostly, they become dangerous amoral creatures who act more and more anti-social.
So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
Testable predictions if my theory is true: SIDS rates will be higher among lower IQ parents and higher among blacks, probably also higher among single mothers.
..... (sadly) ding, ding, ding.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
13d ago
I've worked on CL HFT systems (n.b. since ~2017 the field's not looked anything like the popular world things, because of regulatory and policy changes.)
If you do an effortpost on your experience here, I'll find a way to compensate you.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
Women genuinely struggle to lead men, and are more indecisive, more prone to command by committee, crack more easily under stress, and blatantly favor their sisters in every situation.
Tell the group how you feel about Captain Shaina Coss
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
You're not accurately modeling the level of evil.
It's not that the government will euthanize the eldery. It's that society will encourage the elderly, gently, to kill themselves.
This is why you're seeing discourse around assisted suicide and "death with dignity" popping back up. But, you now what, it's probably not a big deal, I mean, that's only a fringe element of people who---
1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.
Oh.
So we've got a 5% "rank and yank" quota going on. Bump it up to 10%, concentrated in the elderly and "differently abled" and, all of a sudden, we've got a nice little euthanasia-eugenics garbage collection app for society. Go Team!
If there is not a fundamental sacred respect for life in a society, then that society defaults to a pro-eugenic stance. Over time, with subtlety, that society will ruthlessly select for its preferred characteristics like a breeder surveying new born puppies.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
As other comments downthread have said, replicating the Haredi is a bad idea. First, there is definitely a high level of welfare fraud. Second, much like the Amish and FLDS groups, the Haredi essentially get away with breaking a ton of Federal laws because "lol, they wear those funny hats!" or something.
Just walk around Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It is obvious that the apartments are not up to code, have too many people living in them to meet occupancy maximums, and are probably covered by rental "agreements" which would be laughed out of a basic contract law course at NYU.
But, again, NY/NJ and Federal prosecutors aren't going to destroy their careers by hauling a bunch of literal grey bearded Rabbis into court.
Replicating them secularly would not work at all -- any group trying to do all of this would get sued into oblivion. In a religious context, FLDS do this out west to an extent. The problem is that any Christian group who would be willing to live like the Haredi usually have a "imminent end of days" bent to them and so generally like to be off grid / separate from the modern world instead of .... embedded in Brooklyn.
It takes a special kind of cognitive athleticism to think "I despise this modern world and all of its impious distractions .... when is the darn N train going to come?"
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence.
The founding fathers presaged this and wrote The Federalist Papers specifically to address it.
TLDR; Far, far more power should be delegated to states and localities. This is what the tenth amendment says. Like, lit-ra-lly;
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The cascading usurpation of this began with the 14th amendment and then was wildly expanded by the Civil Rights Act. Strange how that lines up with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, ya?
You now - or, until recently - had Offices of Civil Rights in almost every executive agency who's express job was to try and find the hidden racisms in ... anything ... so that some sort of amorphous yet far reaching suit could be brought in federal court.
And, of course, any congress person who would voice a concern with the 1964 CRA, despite the fact that his metastasized multiple times in every decade since its original passage would instantly bet met with breathless cries of "the racisms!".
All of this is to repeat the apocryphal story about Ben Franklin;
When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Frankling, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."
And, slowly, over time, under the cover of "righteous intent", we've decided to abandon the republic in favor of a centralized capital-S State that reaches down to wrap it's testicles tentacles around each one of us all.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
I want to emphasize how much I like this post. It's such a compelling illustration of what small c-conservatism believes. A lot of the writing around it gets gummed up in some, frankly, high falutin' verbiage (Scruton, Kirk, Buckley) and, so, the point is obscure.
But this nails it. "You should be the one to make the choices that define your old age" and "But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything..." are particularly vivid.
I don't want guarantees from the State for anything. Because any sort of guarantee in that context is actually a pretty profound limitation of my ability to determine my own future.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.
I think we'll see some level of SRDS - Sudden Retiree Death Syndrome. Essentially "suicide by willful negligence" on the part of some boomers. "Forgetting" to take necessary meds, going for a nice little midnight walk by a bridge, getting interested in at-home amateur electrical work all of a sudden.
I don't think this will be anywhere near the majority. I expect it to be a small enough percentage that it is largely overlooked. Still, when the boomers are well into their 80s, they'll come fact to face with the fact that 1) Raisin ranch existence isn't actually fun or meaningful and 2) Their own children and grandchildren are, yet, still footing the bill for it.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
"Written by AI" alarm bells going off. The paragraph structure and word choice here is telling:
What once required a machine-learning PhD can often be accomplished in a matter of days by a technically competent practitioner using cloud platforms such as Google Cloud. While humanoid robots have captured public attention and robot butlers remain unrealistic, AI is already accelerating the deployment of industrial robots and other forms of automation. Advanced driver-assistance systems are reducing the risk of traffic accidents, and AI is speeding up academic work and scientific discovery. More broadly, AI excels at uncovering patterns in massive datasets and surfacing insights and information that would otherwise remain hidden.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
14d ago
It was a humorous juxtaposition. You stated "My sister reads about terrorists. She's not doing it because she has the hots for Osama Bin Lade." I then shared a link which documented an FBI translator who fell in love with an ISIS terrorist.
It's funny because it provides an example that counters your assertion, but in an over the top and outlandish way. My jocular statement "whatever you say, Fed" was a tacit confirmation that your point is valid and I agree with it, but wrapped in "Very online" verbiage.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
Oh, are you certain about that?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
There's the argument that the post-WW2 combination of cheap housing and the expansion of the welfare state in Great Britain (together with the growth of new art schools and direct public funding for culture) resulted in a extraordinary wave of music, art, and cultural experimentation, completely over-proportional to the relative size of British society. And if you look at the artist at the fore-front, much of them came from working‑class or lower‑middle‑class backgrounds.
(The above is actually from a comment below, not the original post)
As the internet kids say, "This."
If we're actually in a "money doesn't mean much" AGI world, people don't stop having preferences and values. It will just shift from the directly tangible material ones to more abstract ones. Namely; taste. I can't remember where I saw it, but this is the "big theory" of one of the AI super thinkers (Karpathy maybe?). Taste, appreciate for aesthetics, and deeply held belief in something like "beauty" will become the way that humans organize their preferences. Instead of "how much is in your bank account? What zipcode do you live in?" we'd signal relative capability by demonstrating our ability to evaluate these abstract ideas.
There's a ton of precedent for this. Fashion, as an industry, is perhaps just a few months younger than city level agriculture. Besides finance, which is the business of money itself, and technology, which is nonlinear efficiency gains, Fashion has created more billionaires than any other business - I believe this actually includes energy (oil etc.)!
Gen Z is defined by its adherence to "vibes" - an abstract concept that combines aesthetics and trends with general emotive intuition. Trying to "flex" your bankroll with Gen Z, in fact, often "fails the vibecheck." Gen Z is, of course, the generation that will define themselves by, with, and through their relationship to AGI (the boomers can fortify themselves within their retirement castles, while Gen X and Millenials have a good old culling of the herd to see who gets to cannibalize what's left of a human economy).
So what does this mean in practice? People who can develop a taste / aesthetic / abstract values "stack" will do well in the AGI era. Pure shape rotators are going to have difficulties. But, then, I don't actually know that many 20 year+ software development veterans that don't have a kind of style to themselves or opinions on how things ought to be (not, here, in reference to moral or metaphysical values). I'd be more concerned for someone who's only ever grinded leetcode and muscle-memorized development frameworks. On the other side of the spectrum, wordcels who only ever try to track the mood (vibe?) of the audience and pander to them are also probably hosed. Contrast this to the likes of The Last Psychiatrist and even Scott himself; opinionated (even when ostensibly trying not to be), stylistic, with loose opinions strongly held.
In this way, I have a lot of hope for people not based on the title or functional nature of their job, but on the level of personal passion and opinion that they can develop.
Most people don't "care about the world" because they only ever care about themselves in the world. Although such a disposition seems and, in fact, is self-centered, it's also inherently reacive; How do I get what I want out of this given set of circumstances?. They might be playing a single player game, but it's in a world they accept as more or less immutable. Escaping AGI is the same as escaping The World; you have to minimize the ego and develop a values system that goes beyond the here and now. You have to align yourself with something infinite (the abstract) and then believe in it deeply (taste / passion / aesthetic opinion). If people do this, they'll be fine AGI or not.
I don't think 90% of people will ever do this.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
15d ago
I identify as a malt liquor True Crime cousin in that, I do, Truly, Crime-it-up to support my drinking problem.
The true crime wine mom phenomenon deserves an effortpost in the Sunday thread. If I make it intact through Christmas and College Football Bowl games, I might take a crack at it. One of the main themes, I think, would be that Married Woman True Crime pathology is an extreme form of the same pattern in trash romance novels; the danger is the attraction. Instead of taming the pirate captain / barbarian / whatever, True Crime Moms "solve" the case and therefore "tame" ... Ed Kemper? Yeah, it doesn't quite track and that's why I call it extreme -- these gals probably get off, to some extent, on the grisly details. This smart lady has a good, long vlog about the extreme world of female oreinted Romantasy - aka, hardcore smut.
But there's another true crime audience we're talking about. It isn't true crime, actually. It's internet real-time sleuths. The earliest big example of this that easily comes to mind was the Boston Marathon bombing. I actually stumbled across the Reddit thread where they were capturing CCTV footage, timestamps, rando schizo tweets (some of which turned out to be accurate). Anyway, these people, to me, are far more dangerous. It's an entire population of turbo-autists who have heard of "confirmation bias" exactly once, right before they discarded it as "not applicable to me because I am so smart." It's the same mode of thinking that leads down the path to "believe all women" and, yet, "trans women are women" (so, then, I guess we're believing every person?)
When these very online folks start to "work the case" for the Brown shooting, or any other event, they create a kind of epistemology-optional universe of ad hoc worldbuilding, but use real people and real data to prop up their shaky scaffolding. This is what makes it so bad. I have no problem with making up fun stories as a hobby or even professional pursuit. But when you're trying to cycle that "information" back into the real world in order to effect real world outcomes you're engaged in an enterprise that is actively hostile to basic civil liberties.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
Graeber was an activist far more than he was a serious academic. The "bullshit" label for jobs is just a vibe. It's very emotionally pleasing to look at the local Vice Presidents of Spreadsheets and say, "what do you even do, maaaann?" while smirking. But the fact of the matter is that those Spreadsheets might actually be moving tens of millions of dollars of real corporate value that ultimately help people get anything from basic needs (groceries) to durable goods that meaningfully improve their life (appliances, cars, etc.) Even if it's just AI slop marketing, digital commerce is a hyper efficient abstraction of the movement of value. You can make very good metaphysical critiques of this, but Graeber tried to make economic critiques. He failed.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
This is really interesting, so "good" players try to avoid chaotic situations and play when they have a better gut sense of what they think the other people are actually doing?
More or less, yes. Good players try to exploit situations where they have a biased informational advantage. After learning the basics of poker, Poker 102 is learning about what's called "position play" (you can google it). A lot of professional level players pretty much follow the same first line strategy; be patient and wait for strong hands when you're in position, and then bet in a way that signal some but not crazy strength. This is sometimes referred to as "slow playing."
In poker, every action you take reveals some level of information. You can try to be coy and attempt to signal false information (i.e. bluffing) but that's hard to do well over the long term. People have tells and, moreover, eventually someone will call your bluff. Instead, you try to signal with some ambiguity, some noise, and then try to get the other player(s) in the hand to reveal too much true information. A good fold before having to bet a lot of money is just as smart a decision as calling when someone has preemptively revealed too much.
The difficult emerges when we consider scale. Professional poker players are just that - professionals. They will play poker 40+ hours per week, often exceeding 12, 14 hours in a single day. Nate Silver writes his annual guide to the world series of poker and remarks how, if you make it to the third (?) day, you should be prepared for up 20+ hours of being awake. This is where people crack. Sleep deprivation and cognitive impairment is real. Add on top of that that you need to start tracking betting habits and patterns in multiple other players and often the difference between winning and losing is just who can keep their shit together longer.
I'm oversimplifying - though not by much - to make the point. If you're interested, you should look up what changed in professional poker after Chris Moneymaker. Before, poker was still somewhat a cowboyish, colorful character world. Guys (and ladies) would play tight, but also gamble, and would have fun. Learning the game, at a deep level, was almost an apprenticeship situation. There wasn't a bunch of Game Theoretic Optimal betting guides online. After the explosion of online poker (of which Chris Monkeymaker was the poster boy), it's (de)volved to a bunch of turbo autists who crunch probability in realm time for 20+ hours. Board and people reading is still a thing, but the default, now, is to play so close to the numbers that mostly it's just a grind. The saving grace is that it's still a random deck of cards and bad beats happen. The joy of poker is that you can make all of the best possible decisions all of the time - and still lose.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
16d ago
like I shouldn't hang out too close to a synagogue.
Lol. Yeah. Those looks will happen. But any guy who's in decent shape and over 6'0" already has had to practice his "I'm not going to do a murdering!" body language. You'd be fine.
I like this sentiment and I'm going to use it to comment more broadly on what I see as an aggravating tension between Tradition and Traditionalism. I'm use those two words so I can play off the "all -isms are bad" meme.
Tradition is a set of beliefs, values, and, importantly, ongoing or repeated behaviors that are inherited from the past with the goal to preserve the present and pass on to the future.
Traditionalism is vibe based gesturing at "how it used to be" with the implication that "it" used to be better. There's going to be some kind of attempt at vaguely repeating the behavior of the past - often incomplete - and a lot of rhetoric about the past. There will be close to zero deeply held beliefs and values under the surface. As Rob Henderson might say, it's mostly about signalling. These are the RETVRN people. I mentioned a young woman like this in previous post.
I think these are your "neotraditionalism" people (all -isms are bad!). And I agree with you that these very "neo-trads" would never vote for some of the ideas you have laid out. Why? Because it would be bad for them, personally, as individuals. And thus I trace this back to the rise of hyperindividualism (isms! isms! isms!).
I'm not advocating for actual collectivism the way Mamdani did in his inaugural speech today. I'm advocating for the idea that there was a society before that gave us what we have to day and our job is to sustain it and then pass it on. That's the chain of real capital-T Tradition that did sustain so many different human societies up until about the 20th century. The proto-causes are still up for debate; was it the industrial revolution? global financialization of capitalism? the "trauma" of WW1/2? I can't weigh in with authority here, but I can point to one thing that I think is key:
The Baby Boomers broke that chain of real capital-T Tradition. In both directions. They looked at their parents with their going to church and waiting for matrimony and not smokin the wacky-tobaccy and said "Peace and Love, Man!" before inventing the pill, porn, no-fault divorce, equality, feminism, and affirmative action. Next, wanting to enjoy the prosperity of a post WW2 America (that they, the boomers, totally earned on their own and didn't inherit from the Greatest Generation) voted for Social Security, Medicare/caid, and home mortgage subsidy. This created a massive debt burden that they would never pay because their children and grandchildren will.
Gen-X kind of got caught in the crossfire, but when you could work at a coffee shop in Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and date a quirky mid in the 1990s, it was kind of ... whatever, cool, I guess.
Millienials woke up to the grift and Gen-Z seems to have been born nihilistic. They know the boomers looted the store and then stuck everyone else with the bill. They, rightfully, are enraged by this but only a small fraction has eaten the bitter medicine and realized "ah, shit, we're going to have to fix this ... and it's going to be hard for a while." Instead, 90% + of Mil-Z-enials are somewhere between "Government provided everything, tax the rich" and "Fuck it, Imma get mine. Let's hit some crypto scams, bruh" Both of these are anti-social and, of course, non Traditional. I agree heartily with you that only a hyper minority of mostly religious or strongly philosophically disciplined / metaphysically driven people in these two generations are seriously committing to "we can rebuild, and our kids will benefit."
How this all plays out is that we're going to see a slow motion culling of the population where we can afford it most - young men. We know this because it has already happened. I don't even need to quote the stats anymore. Opioid epidemic, 6 - 8 million prime age males out of the workforce, incels, no friends etc. A great way to sidestep demographic gravity is to led some deadweight drop. That's bleak and I know it. It's also what's happening.
The next necessary ingredient is peeling back the feminist lie of fulfillment in a career alone. This is already starting. When TradWife tiktoks trend for a while and then we get backlask like "is having a boyfriend cringe?" articles, it means the ideas are now circulating and its just a matter of time before some percentage of women decides "fuck a job, I want babies." It doesn't have to be that great a number, it just has to be present outside of the semi-sequestered religious communities (Amish, FLDS, etc.)
The thing that keeps me up at night is how long all of this could take. Returning to my original framing, the people who buy into Traditionalism aren't actually willing to do what needs doing to fix things because it will probably mean accepting a slightly materially less comfortable quality of life for some time and an absolutely lower social quality of life as well (i.e. getting branded as a kind of weirdo). But they will gesture vaguely to things like "encouraging earlier marriage" and "keeping a family together." But will they endorse women not going to college? Will they endorse no-fault divorce? Of course not. And I wonder how long this will draw the pain out, especially when the other side (progressives) are offering sprinting into oblivion. The Traditionalism-ists don't need to really dig deep to retain political and social sway when their opponents are literally recommending self-castration, baby murder, and neo-surfdom.
As I've said before in this thread and as Amadan said below, I don't want to control women (or men) from a State perspective. If a woman wants to get three PhDs and never marry, that's on her - just as it would be on a man. But, right now, we're actively subsidizing those decisions socially, culturally, and even financially whereas were suppressing capital-T tradition socially and culturally. This isn't "boo hoo unfair!" this is drawing out the agony for society.
More options
Context Copy link