Crake
Protestant Goodbot
No bio...
User ID: 1203
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
6mo ago
I don't think that is true, as much as I wish it was.
From what I see, elite democrats and their followers often support policies that are directly detrimental to them and their children. White PMC urban Democrats support racial ideologies and policies that give their white children disadvantages, both psychological and scholastic. Why would this be any different?
Progressivism is not a business. It has religious characteristics. True believers don't follow rational self interest. The more ardent believers will happily make choices that are bad for them and their children, because they see those choices as holy. I know people from the urban PMC class who would happily let the mob burn down their house and apologize for owning property while it happened.
But you could be right. The PMC urban democrats I am exposed to may not be representative of the group in general.
Do you have all day?
I have time. This is an asynchronous forum.
not any more than you could explain to me why intelligent people adopt Christianity as adults in the year 2024.
That sounds like a pretty interesting conversation to me, to be honest. We would disagree but we could still communicate I think.
I feel like that runs contrary to the purpose of this forum. Communication and argument across perspectives is what makes it interesting to be here.
When you see the world not as an ineffable force of nature to cope with and accept, but as a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want, it is plainly obvious that such a system is, in fact, better than total collapse.
For most of my life I had that standard nerd perspective that the world was improved by technology. It's only been experience that has lead me to question the upside of technology. Its only been experience that has lead me to the more conservative position that modernity is not so great.
I have nothing against attempting to manage nature as "a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want" but in my experience that isn't what civilization has done. It has not made something optimal. There are some good things about advanced tech. Medicine maybe, and certainly space flight - the hope of creating extraterrestrial colonies still appeals to me deeply - but beyond that, is life for the individual improving due to technology?
I'm not a luddite. Technology is great. But if it is incompatible with human flourishing, I don't think I see the point. Replacing the standard system of humans being raised by parents seems to empower the technological system too much. Religion is, itself, a form of technology. If we have outrun our ability for our social technology to maintain a healthy social system due to rampant material technological growth, than perhaps we need a reset.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
7mo ago
There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement. You could even put them up for adoption, and while the demand for such isn't infinite, a good number of them would find their way into decent homes.
I mean, we can already subsidize local fertility by importing migrants from areas with higher fertility. I don't think that replacement is a good thing. You're system would prevent that replacement and instead replace some amount of local family raised humans with institutionally raised humans. They will be more alien to me than foreign born humans, in so far as at least foreign born humans have a family.
There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement.
Having both is irrelevant. If the system gets off the ground you'll radically disrupt society to the point that it is unrecognizable. The lab grown kids will either be radically more effective than normal kids, in which case they will replace them. Or they'll be less effective than normal kids and fill the same role as replacing locals with immigrants, except instead of immigrants (who at least have the normal human background of being raised in a family are even more alien) you'll have the lower local caste replaced by clones with all the bizzare effects that would have. Bad outcomes either way.
Still, I don't see this system as being worse than the alternative, and probably on par in terms of outcomes with situations like millions of children who are/were punted over to boarding schools for most of their lives and having disinterested parents. They do alright. The biggest issue with most orphans is the genes they've inherited, and we can fix that.
How is this system better than total collapse? What does high technology offer that could possibly be worth replacing the family unit?
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
7mo ago
You're talking about using a theoretical technology to prop up a civilization that is, by your description, not functioning. It is unlikely, but beyond that, not a good outcome.
Nevertheless, all these things are wants, survival is a need.
Then let the civilization collapse. If the civilization collapses, then we would return to the original ecosystem we evolved for, and the problem would be gone. If the requirement of maintaining our current high level of technology is raising children as orphans via institution, then wouldn't it preferable to abandon high technology and start over? What about high technology is so great as to be worth this trade off you offer.
Industrial scale artificial births are the surest path to success, IMO. Orphans turn out alright, all things considered. Many of the problems with orphans are probably biologically rooted, their genes are probably closer to drug fiends than fantasy heroes. If you picked out good genes and ran a functional education system I think you'd get good results.
I'm surprised that multiple people are suggesting this.
Orphans turn out alright, all things considered
Do they?
But even if you could create governmental institutions that could raise children from birth to 18 and create psychologically healthy people, the result seems catastrophic from a cultural perspective.
One of the core structural units of society is the family, whether that is the western mother-father-kids atomic option, or clans, or other arrangements I'm less familiar with. This is a pillar of every society ever. The differences between different family structures are defining features of different cultures.
It should be assumed that tinkering with family structure in any culture will lead to large outcomes. It's a very central node of society, messing around with it will have large effects. But you aren't just talking about tinkering with it, you're talking about eliminating it entirely. An entire layer of society and culture simply excised from the stack. Is it not obvious that that would have massive and unpredictable societal implications?
Lets say we build a system that can raise orphans successfully, and we artificially create a generation of highly optimized orphans that turn out psychologically healthy (which I question the viability of, but for the sake of argument) - imagine how that would change the political balance of power. Atomic family units as part of a larger network of families or in some places a full on clan, have a huge amount of sway in creating the political landscape. Your newly raised orphans will be completely devoid of any kind of familial association. They won't have any cultural heritage besides whatever is inculcated into the at the institution. No family history or values. Most children grow up to reflect their parents values and politics, well, not anymore, they don't have that.
This seems to totally remove a central break on the expansion of institutional power whether thats governmental or otherwise.
Whoever, or more realistically whatever, is in charge of raising the kids, will be a new cultural structure with enormous power. It will consume a huge chunk of the political power currently contained within family structures. Why would you want that? Who knows what it will look like?
I would have thought that reducing the atomization of humans in modernity was an obvious core goal held by most people raised in western nations in modernity, I have not really heard people argue that they are in favor of increased atomization. But it seems like that is what you are suggesting?. Do you consider the atomization of humans in modernity to be a good outcome? I mean that question sincerely, I think I may need to reconsider my assumptions.
Crake
Protestant Goodbot
7mo ago
You genuinely think that applying the model from plato's republic of separating production of children from the family unit would have good outcomes?
Artificial wombs as a tool to let couples have kids without the women have to deal with childbirth is one thing. But you think that creating a generation of children largely raised by the government without a family would be a good way to combat birth rate decline? Being raised by a mother and father, or at least paired parents, is pretty important for children. And my assumption would be that having a single committed parent tends to have better outcomes than being an orphan who is never adopted and makes it to 18 purely raised by government institutions.
Even within the bounds of a question that is an "if you were the all powerful sovereign" style question - I still have a hard time believing you think that would be a good idea.
I suppose I am predisposed to disagree, because if you succeeded in creating a protocol to raise children via institutions successfully, that would remove the family as a core unit of society, which to me appears to be the exact opposite of what should be our goal. I think that should be elevated as the core unit and the relevance of individuals should be decreased.
But even beyond that, the idea that you could achieve success with such a system seems totally wild. You're talking about implementing a system that, based on all existing stats would be a total disaster, and then trying to scale that to make it more optimal than normal family rearing. What makes you think that can be done? It's total utopian thinking.
What? It's no one's damned business if I'm wearing underwear or not. You can't tell by looking, so it "neither picks [your] pocket nor breaks [your] leg".
That's a heuristic for if something should be illegal. In my opinion a bad heuristic (hard drug dealing doesn't directly pick my pocket but it should still be illegal as far as I'm concerned), but my thoughts on the heuristic aside, it is still usually deployed to argue that something distasteful to one but not directly injurious should not be the purview of law. The line before it is "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others".
I really don't agree with the OP of this thread. I think the lack of bras currently is, as he suggests as a possible reason, just fashion.
But I also think your argument doesn't really dispute him nor the person you directly responded to. Neither said anything about imposing a law that required women to wear bras. OOP was venting about a cultural practice and saying that we should have a cultural norm against it.
What does this mean in this context?
More options
Context Copy link