TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
No bio...
User ID: 616
You hit the nail on the head here, and highlighted something that isn’t often discussed but is absolutely crucial to the dominance of modernistic liberal culture. Hyper mobility of location and the willingness to abandon your birth culture is completely baked into the current ruling class. In order to pass the crucible and become an elite, you absolutely must be willing to throw your previous, place-rooted culture under the bus. It’s not even hidden or very subtle.
Part of this culture is the criticism or doubt in almost everything. New York WASPs are out of touch and bad because they’re rich. Deep South folks are out of touch and bad because they love white people and hate black people. Californians are okay but there are still plenty of bad apples there that need to be eradicated.
Overall the modern elite liberal culture demands total obedience to the demands of their ideology. While it’s not explicitly written in a declaration of loyalty like previous political ideologies have created, the social reality is undeniable. And the lack of an explicitly written down creed which denounces one’s culture of birth, while simultaneously demanding this denunciation socially, is in my opinion modern progressivism’s most impressive and almost unique strength.
Strip a man of the ideals and culture he grew up with, and he will have no recourse but to toe the party line and double down on the latest progressive ideology.
Materialism, as the philosophy exists today, is a relatively recent phenomenon. When we talk about someone being a 'materialist' we don't mean they shop for lots of handbags or fancy dining room sets. Instead, a materialist is generally defined as seeing all facts or pieces of the world, including the human mind and will, as dependable on or in the most extreme case reducible to physical processes.
In other words, there is only physical matter moving around and interacting, no other forces exist in the universe.
There are a number of major issues within determinism such as free will, and the seeming ability of humans to make choices that operate outside of physical processes. Of course this claim has been papered over from the materialist side by claiming that free will is just an illusion, but the determinists haven't made much headway. The most famous contemporary materialist from my understanding is Daniel Dennett, who has written extensively on free will, determinism, religion, et cetera, and basically come up with a convoluted 'compatibalist' view: that the world is all physical processes, yet we also have free will. Somehow.
Now challenges to materialism present a number of problems, primarily the fact that our modern, statistical, ScientificTM worldview cannot tolerate or understand any phenomena that aren't easily and simply repeated. Even if supernatural phenomenon did exist however, the bias against them has grown so massive in the last century that any respectable scientist wouldn't be caught dead going near these claims.
Why does this matter for the Culture War? Well outside of even religion, our entire cultural regime rests upon Science being the arbiter of truth and ender of disputes. If it turns out our materialistic worldview science has given us ends up being false, there are innumerable cultural repercussions, from the temporal vindication of religion to the re-opening of entire new vistas of understanding. Materialism's truth or falsity is, I would argue, the most important higher level question for our world to answer at the moment. Unfortunately, the mainstream consensus has been that materialism is true a priori despite massive contradictions. Even if many moderns don't outright argue this, their actions and stances on various topics reveal them as materialists through and through.
I'd imagine many people reading this haven't been exposed to some of the more respectable claims of anti-materialists. I'm going to quote heavily from this article by Roger's Bacon to give you an idea of some of the more interesting claims. Bacon, in turn, pulls heavily from a book entitled The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, if you're interested in further reading.
Bacon explains how Freeman Dyson, an intellectual titan by any standard, posited this idea:
In my review I said that ESP only occurs, according to the anecdotal evidence, when a person is experiencing intense stress and strong emotions. Under the conditions of a controlled scientific experiment, intense stress and strong emotions are excluded; the person experiences intense boredom rather than excitement, so the evidence for ESP disappears...The experiment necessarily excludes the human emotions that make ESP possible.
This view is generally referred to as "Traumatic Transcendence," or in other words you need extremely strong states to activate latent 'powers' or abilities, states which controlled experiments almost by definition cannot excite in patients. We're not just talking scaring someone a bit, we're talking extremely near death or something similar. And even in those states it's an extreme rarity of cases, apparently. However, we have extensive anecdotal reports, many from quite distinguished thinkers and well corroborated, that propose something like traumatic transcendence being real.
There are of course other examples. I'm going to quote this one from Mark Twain at length, which I find fascinating:
Dressed in his famous white “dontcaredam suit” Mark Twain was famous for mocking every orthodoxy and convention, including, it turns out, the conventions of space and time. As he related the events in his diaries, Twain and his brother Henry were working on the riverboat Pennsylvania in June 1858. While they were lying in port in St. Louis, the writer had a most remarkable dream:
In the morning, when I awoke I had been dreaming, and the dream was so vivid, so like reality, that it deceived me, and I thought it was real. In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the centre.
Twain awoke, got dressed, and prepared to go view the casket. He was walking to the house where he thought the casket lay before he realized “that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream. Alas, it was not. A few weeks later, Henry was badly burned in a boiler explosion and then accidentally killed when some young doctors gave him a huge overdose of opium for the pain. Normally, the dead were buried in a simple pine coffin, but some women had raised sixty dollars to put Henry in a special metal one. Twain explained what happened next:
When I came back and entered the dead-room Henry lay in that open case, and he was dressed in a suit of my clothing. He had borrowed it without my knowledge during our last sojourn in St. Louis; and I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail; but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the centre of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.
Now who of us would not be permanently marked, at once inspired and haunted, by such a series of events? Who of us, if this were our dream and our brother, could honestly dismiss it all as a series of coincidences? Twain certainly could not. He was obsessed with such moments in his life, of which there were all too many. In 1878, he described some of them in an essay and even theorized how they work. But he could not bring himself to publish it, as he feared “the public would treat the thing as a joke whereas I was in earnest.” Finally, Twain gave in, allowed his name to be attached to his own experiences and ideas, and published this material in Harper’s magazine in two separate installments: “Mental Telegraphy: A Manuscript with a History” (1891) and “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895).”
Again, there are almost endless examples of these types of phenomena occurring, which are unfortunately decried by any scientific establishment that exists today.
However, traumatic transcendence isn't the only explanation. Another reasonable explanation for our inability to capture these occurrences in experiments would be that they are mediated by an intelligent, non-human agent of some kind such as a ghost, demon, angel, God or gods, et cetera. In fact, this is the claim straightforwardly put forth by most believers in the supernatural throughout history. Which of course is essentially all humans before the last century.
If these other beings did in fact cause supernatural events to happen, or at least need to give their 'permission' so to speak for the normal laws of physics to be suspended, well then of course we wouldn't be able to predict when it would happen. We still aren't even good at predicting human behavior, outside of pacified and corralled Westerners who are manipulated 24/7 by intense media designed to change their behavior.
Another idea to explain supernatural phenomena, while a bit more 'out there,' is actually one I find quite compelling. Bacon outlines it as such:
In traumatic transcendence, we see reality responding to an acute state of consciousness in some individual. However, there may also be a sense in which this happens “chronically” in response to states of collective consciousness. This leads to a startling conclusion, one that forms a central theme of Kripal’s work: culture directly affects the real by mediating and constraining the kinds of consciousness experiences which people are capable of having. In a very literal sense then, the metaphysical paradigm of an age determines the metaphysical truth of that age.
We did not simply realize the truth of secular materialism, we “realized” it.
Crucially, this is not something that one can simply opt out of by adopting some facile belief in the supernatural. To live in this age of disenchantment is to operate within an episteme of doubt and suspicion; this makes it almost impossible to obtain those states of consciousness which require absolute metaphysical belief of some kind. The spell was broken once we began compulsively “looking over our shoulders at other beliefs” (Charles Taylor).4
This idea is actually explored quite a bit in fantasy and science fiction - for instance Warhammer 40K has a similar world, where every conscious mind's inherent beliefs do affect material reality, and enough of those together can cause a planet or part of the universe to operate drastically differently than others.
It's worth considering, at the very least.
Overall, there are still many mysteries to be explained in our universe, despite what our reductionist and materialist culture would have you think. I'll end with another block quote from Kripal, as he says it better than I ever could:
As Aldous Huxley pointed our long ago in his own defense of “mystical” experiences, we have no reason to think from our ordinary experience that water is composed of two gases fused together by invisible forces. We know this only by exposing water to extreme conditions, by “traumatizing” it, and then by detecting and measuring the gases with advanced technology that no ordinary person possesses or understands.
Nothing in our everyday experience gives us any reason to suppose that matter is not material, that it is made up of bizarre forms of energy that violate, very much like spirit, all of our normal notions of space, time, and causality. Yet when we subject matter to exquisite technologies, like the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, then we can see quite clearly that matter is not “material” at all. But—and this is the key—we can only get there through a great deal of physical violence, a violence so extreme and so precise that it cost billions of dollars, necessitated the participation of tens of thousands of professional physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists, and required decades of preparation to inflict it and then analyze its results. Hence the recent discovery of the “God particle,” or Higgs boson at CERN.
We invested our energies, time, and money there, and so we are finding out all sorts of astonishing things about the world in which we live and of which we are intimate expressions. But we will not invest them here, in the everyday astonishing experiences of human beings around the world, and so we continue to work with the most banal models of mind—materialist and mechanistic ones—that is, models that assume that “mind equals brain” and the psyche works like, or is, a computer. What is going on here? Why are we so intent on ignoring precisely those bodies of evidence that suggest that, yes, of course, mind is correlated with brain, but it is not the same thing. 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? (The Flip, pg. 38)
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Has anyone else gone through a period in adult life where you realize you've kind of forgotten how to actually have fun?
I'm not talking about just zoning out to a video game, but joyous laugh-out-loud relaxing fun. For me I feel I've gotten so bogged down with job issues, health issues, and planning for the future that even when I carve out 'free time' I never fully relax and just have fun.
Anyone relate? Or have stories on how they got out of such a mode?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Is this sarcastic? Do you genuinely not understand that many people live lives of despair and feel they have no hope of things ever getting better?
Most people don't want to OD from drugs or commit suicide. They do because their lives are purposeless, hopeless, and devoid of meaning.
The atheist/religious believer inferential gap is always huge, and especially difficult to bridge in rationalist forums. As someone who went from a materialist to one of the faithful, let's see if I can explain why statements like:
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
tend to rub me the wrong way. More importantly, they represent a total failure to grasp what most intellectually rigorous religious people actually believe.
What most rationalists (with the noteworthy exception of @coffee_enjoyer) fail to understand when discussing religion is that scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims." While the power of the scientific method, and more generally the method of treating all matter as 'dead' or devoid of mind a la Descartes, is undeniable, predictive power does not make something true in any metaphysical sense. Many modern philosophers argue that any description of life itself can't be formulated via materialism means, without resorting to an appeal to some higher organizational, metaphysical structure.
Historically the scientific materialist worldview has of course revealed much about the natural world, primarily through demythologizing our place in it. Over the past few decades however, we as a society have come more and more to understand the limits and outright detriments of a materialist approach. As the popularity of symbolic thinkers like Jordan Peterson clearly demonstrates, materialism leads to a 'meaning crisis' where people struggle to have any sort of deep purpose or narrative arc to their life, something that is deeply necessary for human happiness and flourishing.
While a ScientistTM may just scoff at the importance of meaning or purpose and say "Who cares, my science still gives me Truth," well, unfortunately that assertion is becoming more and more false by the day. L.P. Koch gives a decent summary in The Death of Science, but you can read about the phenomenon of our scientific apparatus falling apart all over the place. You've got the joke field of 'consciousness studies', the deep issues in quantum physics, the shocking revelation that our cosmic model is completely wrong via the James Webb space telescope, et cetera. Or just look at the fiasco of the Covid-19 response.
All of this to say, when people nowadays talk about religion having a comeback, what they often mean on a deeper level is that the Enlightenment myth, first posed by Descartes, is failing. Starting with the existentialists in the mid-20th century, this understanding is now percolated through to the masses with the help of the Internet and other mass communication technology. It's increasingly clear that the mechanistic, clockwork universe of the 19th century, again while granting us great power, is a framework that only goes so far; crucially this framework does not and cannot touch on the deeper questions of human meaning, other than giving us a destructive, nihilistic hedonism.
Ultimately the rationalist Enlightenment has been a Faustian bargain for humanity - we've gained unfathomable power over the natural world compared to our ancestors, but we have lost our souls in the process.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Have you looked into John Vervaeke's series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis? He goes in depth into outlining the problem, and possible solutions. Although the latter half where he gets all into psychological concepts is skippable for sure.
Long story short - you have to have a lot of things to find purpose. You need a community, people around you that care about you and know you and will help you improve towards your purpose. You need some psychotechnology like prayer, meditation, et cetera to keep your mind focused. You also need to work on getting into the flow state, et cetera.
Idk man, it's not easy. I've been trying to find something like this myself, and it's a tough road but there are bright spots. Progress is possible.
One way to find purpose is to look at your life, and figure out where you've been hurt by other people or the world. What problems exist that made life harder for you? Then try to work on fixing those, to help others in the future who may be in your same situation. Just a thought.
Another thought would be to read great literature, like Dostoyevsky or Paradise Lost or Faust or whatever. Just check out some of the all time great works in the Western canon. A lot of them have themes around purpose and meaning in life, how to deal with it's loss and how to find it again.
Wishing you luck brother.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
More generally, a lot of modernity serves the interests of a small minority of happily atomized PMC ‘decouplers’ who want to maximize their individual freedom at the expense of the institutions that allow for a more broad-based happiness. “I can gamble without getting addicted, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can smoke mountains of 20%+ thc weed without losing all motivation and sitting on my couch watching SpongeBob all day, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to? I can find meaning and happiness in hedonism, consumption and career success, so why shouldn’t we abandon traditional forms of spirituality? I can have casual sex with many people without any physical harm or psychological damage coming to me, so why shouldn’t I be able to without condemnation?” The problem comes if freeing these people from the chains of tradition and obligation actively damages the lives of many others, and I think it does.
Incredibly well said, AAQC'ed. This line of thinking is something I've believed for a long time without being able to put into words exactly. As much as I love @BurdensomeCount and his excellent trolling, he is definitely the exact type of person our modern, atomistic society is set up to serve.
And while individual liberty is overall a good compared to the previous system of tyrannical monarchies, I absolutely agree we've taken it too far. Perhaps if we could find a situation where individual liberty was allowed but sort of looked down upon or difficult to achieve, that would be far better. That way only those extremely motivated to pursue liberty will achieve it, while the majority will be "stuck" with traditional modes of life that likely fit them better, and help balance out their negative inclinations.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
4mo ago
I'll go ahead and guess: it will look explicitly and seriously religious.
To me the social history of the last few decades, and indeed the last few centuries, is that of a hollowing out and lack of seriousness in religious practices and traditions. While there have been revivals here and there, the overall trend has been to become more and more secular as modern 'philosophy' and science becomes more powerful. When Descartes completely threw out Aristotelean formal causes, and claimed the Mind was totally separate from the body and physical reality, he unwittingly destroyed the way humans made sense of the world and each other from time immemorial.
At this point I'm convinced that modern philosophy, specifically post-Cartesian philosophy that sees materialism as the ultimate truth and the universe as nothing more than meaningless particles bouncing into each other, cannot coexist with human society. Either we will destroy our societies through increasing social fragmentation, or the transhumanists will get their wish and change the fundamental way human beings interact with each other to paper over the problems of a materialist philosophy. Perhaps both will happen.
Either way, Social Justice has become such a force because it attempts to fill the gap left by the absence of sincere religions, and just like previous 'isms' and secular ideologies, it is doomed to fail because these sorts of religious systems just can't work in a materialist universe. For better or worse, humans need to believe in purpose and meaning beyond dead matter in order to cohere together in large social groups. If we can't have that, well, we will burn it all down.
Personally I think Christianity will rise again to rule the day, at least on a religious level. It has died many times before and come back from the grave - that motif being the mythological bedrock upon which the entire enterprise is founded is no coincidence. The primary, hidden strength of Christ's gospel is the fact that it gives hope in the darkest of times, and promises a renewal and escape from death.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Does this actually matter to anyone?
Yes, theology matters quite a lot to many people. In general though Protestant denominations care much less than Catholics or Orthodox Christians.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Hah I haven’t read that one in too long. Man, I love Scott’s writing but the mental gymnastics in this quote are astounding:
The results are pretty dismal. Parapsychologists are able to produce experimental evidence for psychic phenomena about as easily as normal scientists are able to produce such evidence for normal, non-psychic phenomena. This suggests the existence of a very large “placebo effect” in science – ie with enough energy focused on a subject, you can always produce “experimental evidence” for it that meets the usual scientific standards
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
How badly behaved is the average four year old? Should they be crying and loud in public or is it reasonable to have them sit quietly at a restaurant for an hour or so with enough discipline?
With the release of the recent Barbie movie, the old gender debates on the internet have been reignited. (Admittedly, I haven't watched it yet, might pen down my thoughts once I do.)
I recently encountered another article by a heterosexual, middle-class woman discussing how we can assist young men in discovering their masculinity. The piece, confidently titled map out of the wilderness, repeats the narrative tropes that countless similar works in journalism tend to focus on.
Does it argue that men are disoriented because women are no longer subservient? Indeed. Does it accuse men of falling for 'destructive' ideologues such as Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert whose political ideologies aren't personally favored? Yes. Does it claim men are discontent because women wish for them to behave more femininely? Absolutely. Does it state there's a lack of 'positive masculinity?' Oh, for sure.
To credit the writer, Christine Emba, she does highlight some of the more sinister issues that venture slightly beyond the bounds of conventional discourse. She openly criticizes feminists and women in general for refusing to assist men, citing an instance where Obama was chastised for attempting to help boys, and thousands of women denounced him in protest.
What prompted me to respond to this article was a moment of blatant self-awareness by the author, who admits when reproached by a man that she doesn't want to be intimate with men who heed her advice (emphasis mine):
Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.
I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.
Yes, dear writer, you recoiled in acknowledgment. If you, a talking head opining on this topic, felt this way, consider the reaction of those numerous women with lesser self-awareness when they encounter these feeble, effeminate men.
However, all the discussions around gender roles, sexual relations, power dynamics, and 'incels' are missing the real issue. They're distractions, veils obscuring the core problem.
At the risk of being cliche, I'll reference Nietzsche's most well-known line:
God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.
Why has this single paragraph echoed throughout recent centuries as one of the deepest and most frequently reiterated explanations of modernity's moral crisis? Obviously, Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed atheist, doesn't imply we've executed deicide in the literal sense. What we've done is obliterated any transcendent reason for existence. There is no apparent reason why young men should exhibit concern for their neighbors, work towards self-improvement, curtail their desires, or even make an effort to contribute to society.
For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?
Regardless of the religion you choose, these systems provided us with a motive beyond primal, materialistic pleasures to care. They provided us with an aim to pursue. Most importantly, they offered us a social framework within which we could strive collectively with others and receive commendation for our benevolent deeds.
Nietzsche's suggested solution is that the New Men must 'become deities' to be worthy of God's murder. Regrettably, as we've found out, not everyone can ascend to godhood. Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?
How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.
Returning to Ms. Emba's proposed solution, she states that men need to experience masculinity by:
by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating.
This, she asserts, is 'Constructive Masculinity.' Let's look past the glaring issue that it's a woman attempting to define what masculinity should be - the question remains: why?
Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist. And not a poor, weak reason like 'following your dreams' or 'getting money' or 'being a good person.' Men need something to strive for, something worth dying for, something that they can use to shield themselves from the terror of the void.
Of course this problem is applicable to far more people than just young Western males. This lack of meaning, lack of purpose, is at the core of modernity's societal problems. It waits like a tiger in the shadows, seizing us in our moments and weakness and pulling us into a black pit of despair, nihilism. Emptiness.
When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?
How will you cleanse your hands of blood?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Most people would just say “well because zoophilia and infant murder are wrong!” Without any conception of the fact that before Christ these things would’ve been totally normal.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Better men than myself have gone up against the edifice of materialist science, spent whole careers showing strong effects and getting nowhere, like Rupert Sheldrake and plenty of others. I don't trust the scientific apparatus to test things like prayer in a valid way, and the replication crisis, Covid, and other issues, to my mind, have born out that skepticism.
I'll also leave a link to this article on angels and demons I quoted below.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Because the pain isn't physical, it's mental/emotional/spiritual. Look up biopsychosocial concepts of pain, or for a more classic take, Healing Back Pain by John Sarno.
As someone who has experienced chronic pain for almost a decade, I can confirm that physical issues are not the cause of my pain at least. I've become convinced that the vast majority of chronic injury and pain is not a mechanical issue either.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
I think my point is that the median "normie" position is much closer to the "liberal" or "progressive" position than you realize.
I don't think he's arguing that... what he's arguing is that normies have been influenced dramatically over a short period of time by extremely aggressive and disingenous political moves from the left. As others have discussed, basically entryism and underhanded tactics to force public spaces to cater to their norms.
Once you have the norms changed, by definition the "normies" will follow along. They're really just people who default to what the norm is, and don't think too much about it.
What people on the right are complaining about is that there used to be, seemingly, a sort of 'gentleman's agreement' not to use tactics that are too underhanded to change norms. The left recently with all their policing of language, pronouns, media, etc. seem to have thrown that informal agreement out of the window. Which, to be fair, is very explicit in leftist who/whom political philosophy. It's part of why people on the right have been warning about communism for the last century.
If you have a political opponent who will stop at nothing to enact their views, it's hard to impossible to work with them in a liberal democratic setting.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8mo ago
This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:
Young adults are afraid to have children, because they can’t possibly imagine adding some to the life they currently have. New parents are isolated from most of their previous friends, as their paths suddenly never cross again unless they too have kids of their own. Children compete within their age group at schools, never having a chance to either mentor someone or have an older mentor themselves. Teenagers have no idea what to do with their lives, because they don’t know anyone who isn’t a teacher or their parent. And everyone is afraid of growing old because they think that the moment they stop going to the office they’ll simply disappear.
As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?
Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.
Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Yeah for sure. I get why people don’t talk about conversion experience in modern society, but it is helpful to read them.
Basically I was very into a sort of Westernized Buddhism for a long time, but then had some tough times in my life that led me to a crisis of faith. I slowly approached the Christian church more out of desperation than anything, if I’m being honest. As I started going my perspective on a lot of things shifted. I read the Bible for the first time, started taking Christian thinkers and themes in media more seriously and seeing a vast depth of wisdom there I had missed. Kind of unprompted I had some let’s say convincing experiences both sober and then on a psychedelic trip that made me consider seriously the whole Christ as God thing.
I also had virtuous Christians come into my life, or realized folks I already knew and respected were deeply religious.
From there I tried out the Orthodox Liturgy and had a super intense emotional reaction, I actually started crying in the service. It was quite embarrassing and a part of me hated it. I mean honestly this whole process has been difficult internally, I find materialism and atheism a difficult mindset to shed which is why part of why I write about it on here occasionally.
Anyway all this happened, I started praying and got more ‘confirmation’ so to speak. For me my experience was kind of seeing visions of the Cross or hearing the voice of God, but it’s all pretty messy and confusing when it comes to that sort of thing. I’d rather not go into the gory personal details.
It wasn’t an all at one experience it was more a collection of coincidences and shifts in mindset, combined with persistent direct experiential signs that slowly convinced me. My conversion has not been an easy or easy even willing one to be quite frank, and I’d imagine most conversions from atheism to religious belief are far more messy than typically presented.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
Hah yeah that was pretty crappy of me, I apologize. I care very deeply about the topic and it’s easy to let emotions cloud your judgment.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
1mo ago
How far am I supposed to bend over backwards extending charity to all the sorcery that turned out to not actually work? Magical beliefs have been with us since we climbed down from the trees, and after thousands of years we have what? What have you brought us?
All of civilization and the foundation that allowed science to be developed and flourish, perhaps?
Yes materialist science is powerful. It's also flawed, and from my perspective has essentially been burning down our cultural myths and the built up social capital of millenia in order to fuel it's relentless search for reductionist physical truths. That store of fuel is almost gone, and if we don't realize and pay attention to the societal structures which undergird science, it won't matter how much scientific knowledge or power we've accrued. We'll kill ourselves anyway.
To be honest, I'm not sure what non-materialists even want from us materialists. They aren't bringing any experimental insights, they aren't bringing any testable theories, and they don't have any magic that works. Do they just want to get snorted at less when they relate their ESP anecdotes at a party or on an internet forum? I don't know what they expect me to do with what they've given me other than shrug.
Generally I want a revival of religion, I want atheism to be a thing of the past and I want materialists to acknowledge arguments and admit they don't know instead of sneering. It seems that's too much to ask, however.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
Whenever I read well detailed articles like this - first off, I appreciate the effort you've put into it. It's clear you care a lot about the issues, and the problems of science as a whole.
Honestly though, I can't help but walk away from a post like this with the idea that Science(TM) is in an awful spot. Or really, I'm nowhere near convinced that Science as it's thought of by everyday people has anywhere near a good grasp on the truth. Whether that's truth in an 'objective' sense via empirical means, or Truth in a more spiritual sense.
@coffee_enjoyer and others on this site have discussed this often, but the fact is that the current model of rationality and Science in the modern world is missing a gigantic part of the world itself - failing on it's own merits of predicting what happens. Unfortunately modern science seems to have doubled down on the Cartesian view that human belief, understanding, and action cannot possibly impact the world. Sure we have sciences like psychology and other 'scientific fields' that attempt to quantify these things, but these fields have been a laughingstock among hard scientists since their inception, and now are increasingly a joke to the everyday person.
All in all I suspect that the time for Reason and Science as the premier arbiters of Truth in our world is coming to a close. In some ways it's a shame, because I think those that are drawn to forums like this are genuine truth seekers. However if you make Reason the ultimate judge of what's real and what isn't, I don't think you actually arrive at truth. It seems to me that you arrive at whatever is convenient to the politics of the time, since Reason can be used to justify practically anything well depending on your starting priors.
As Martin Luther has said:
Reason is the devil's whore. Throw dung on her and make her ugly.
I want to end by emphasizing here that I don't think reason and science are unilaterally bad. They can be extremely useful and beneficial. But reason is an excellent servant, and a terrible master.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
Thanks for the quality response here. I also think the effects of stress are dramatically underrated by modern medical science. Overall we have to understand that our understanding of population level genetics and statistics are extremely poor and misleading. We need far more epistemic humility than we have, especially for a claim as strong as HBD.
Unfortunately, it's easy to believe things that confirm your priors.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
3mo ago
I’ll just say, you may find that a serious relationship is the most intense crucible of your life to this point. Committing to someone and hoping to be with them for the rest of your life, or perhaps even start a family, is no joke. It should be taken seriously emotionally.
It sounds like you’re in the mindset that you shouldn’t be feeling weird about it, that you should stay as cool as a cucumber throughout the whole process. Unfortunately that’s just not how these things work, unless you’re a sociopath. Expect to have more emotions down the road if you continue with this lady, and get used to dealing with them. There are all sorts of tactics out there, personally I’d recommend prayer.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2mo ago
I'm not too interested in this topic at all to be honest, but I think it would be hilarious if Swift just came out in a few months and said "actually, I'm endorsing Trump."
One of the things I hate about celebrity culture is how managed all of a celebrity's opinions and stances seem. There's always 'leaks' about things months ahead, or this sort of manufactured controversy that ends up being true. For once I'd like to see a big celebrity just shake things up and show some actual humanity and agency.
Then again, the type of person who would do that would probably select themselves out of super-stardom unfortunately.
To look at this point a bit, these things are absolutely not arbitrary and worthless. Manners, expected behavior, et cetera are highly refined social technologies that teach people how to socialize in expected manners and not have to figure it all out on their own.
To your examples about leaders dropping decorum, there's a difference between an in control man dropping decorum occasionally for emphasis, and destroying decorum entirely as a concept. Also, mass manipulation of public opinion via inauthentic markers of 'realness' is not a good development, in my personal opinion.
Part of the breakdown we're seeing in community and romantic relationships comes from this attitude of destruction towards all social convention, which rap absolutely pushes as you admit. On a higher level, I think many people on the right dislike rap because it is explicitly about tearing down these old Western ideals and virtues, which you seem to see as a good thing if it's clever and sounds cool.
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