2rafa
12hr ago
But for all this ridiculousness, these seem to be the only way of maintaining key social technologies including fundamental prosocial memes, at least in the West.
Secular reactionaries can come up with countless legitimate reasons for many aspects of traditional morality, but it seems to mean nothing in the West without “you will go to the fire pit for eternity if you break the rules”.
“Why not have free love?”“Well, actually, you know various studies have shown that things like promiscuity can have deleterious effects on partner bonding with later partners, increasing the risk of blah blah blah…”
Secular justifications for traditional social technology just don’t work with normal people of average and below ability, and even with most above them. Yes it’s stupid, but it’s better for our children to believe it than not.
If I was a white gentile I’d probably become a tradcath. I have no particular fondness for Catholicism, but I get the impression many tradcaths don’t either, especially when it comes to the Pope, the Vatican and the actual hierarchical structure and institution of the Catholic Church in practice.
As @coffee_enjoyer said, you need to pick some kind of religious narrative, and almost all invented or new age religions fail and have failed. Tight knit traditionalist religious groups have the best chance of being able to preserve functioning communities.
The only viable option is to pick an existing one. That leaves you with various insular forms of Protestantism, like the Mennonites/Amish, but they take few converts and would require an unlikely degree of adaptation to a new life, with Orthodoxy, which is very ethnically tied to some specific groups like Greeks and Russians in the US, or with Catholicism. Mormonism is in rapid decline and is very goofy. Tradcath groups see many converts, many from mainstream Catholicism but sometimes from outside it too.
There may be fundamental issues with Christianity having some kind of inherent leftward drift (I think the evidence is inconclusive) but in the near/medium term this is probably the best option.
It feels like intelligence agencies could surely find out. Trudeau is at hundreds of events where a drinking glass or whatever could be quietly lifted and the CIA surely has Castro’s DNA from something over the years, plus one of his biological daughters defected to the West and her DNA could be used too.
2rafa
13hr ago
Monkeys are trained to pick coconuts in Thailand commercially, that’s the central example of monkey labor as far as I know. There have been a few historic examples like the baboon in South Africa trained to be a railroad signalman (albeit one under supervision, apparently). I don’t think we really want large numbers of semi-wild monkeys living near populated places in Western countries; in the countries that do have them labor is usually cheap enough that it might not be worth it for many things.
You don’t need to believe it. You just need your kids to believe it, and religious schooling and so on can accomplish that with at least some degree of efficacy.
Secular society has no competent alternative to religious social engineering. All alternatives so far have failed.
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