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Thank you for taking the time and effort to write these posts. As I understand it, your argument is more or less as follows:
There is a large inferential distance between yourself, as a former soldier and a representative of the Red tribe, and most of us on this forum, who went to university young and are mostly some form of international knowledge worker.
This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking. As with the matrix, only a situation that forcibly relocates our worldview will allow us to see what you're getting at.
This inference gap, to the extent that we're capable of seeing it, is basically that we ultimately see things in a systemising, academic way. We are armchair professors who sit down and discuss abstract ideas like race, class, representation. We believe in the existence and importance of Society with a big S. We spend most of our lives in urban environments where social convention and rules are more relevant than fundamental natural laws.
Because we discuss in those terms, we're incapable of stepping back and seeing that this is all just people. By discussing the culture war, we inevitably find ourselves seeing the world on the culture war's terms. You aren't sitting in traffic, you are traffic.
Therefore it is acceptable to describe the average Mottizen as a progressive, even if we vehemently reject that classification, because ultimately it's true. From the perspective of one who can stand outside, we are part of a modern movement which uses a lens that is fundamentally incompatible with what we say we would like to conserve.
@HlynkaCG This is a bit short and muddled, but how close is it? I have thoughts but will put them in a different comment.
(Continued from the above)
I have some innate sympathy with this position, because I have personally known very intelligent people who had blindspots you could drive a bus through and they couldn't see it however gently you led them.
I used to think somewhat similarly to you (perhaps, inferential distance and all that). I was a Cameron Conservative in the UK (kind of like a Reaganite conservative in the US). I really believed in colourblindness, and treating everyone as an individual, and in equality of opportunity. I scoffed at left-wing abstractions like the Establishment, manufactured consent, class conflict. Most of my extended family were army officers.
And then the wind changed.
Without any particular intention to do so, I got caught up in a proto-Culture War conflicts in 2015/2016. I won't bore you with the details, but I learned very quickly that what was said did not matter. There was no meaningful possibility of persuasion. The way you won conflicts was by controlling the people who were in the room to vote. The usual mechanisms for that were to get the committee secretary to slip in lots of boring business before the meaty stuff, so that anyone who didn't care enough to listen through hours of bullshit and miss supper left, and by making life miserable enough for the people who stayed that they didn't come back. I also learned that it's impossible for a man to win a public argument with a crying woman.
The Brexit vote happened maybe a year later. The pattern was stark. Mostly the university staff (cooks, cleaners, etc. were in favour). Every single academic and student was against. Every. Single. One. Even outside academia, again and again I would find myself the only one in the room. At best people would be interested, at worst they would say vile things without even considering the possibility that someone like me could exist. (Those who expressed doubts about mass vaccination during Covid will recognise the feeling). The Establishment did exist, and I'd just fallen out of it.
By your taxonomy, maybe this makes me a failed progressive, I'm not sure. But what I feel like is a failed Conservative. I tried to be an individualist and I found that in this place and at this time, individualism is wrong. There really do exist mass movements of people that you describe with an abstraction like "whites" or "blacks" or "the Establishment". In a world ruled by identarian leftists, which one of those groups you get pattern-matched to, and the relative status of that group, really does matter - it changes what you can do, what you can say, and the consequences for doing so.*
The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive. A predator has appeared that exploits its weaknesses with great efficiency. The Kendi card beats the MLK card at trumps. You can sit there in splendid isolation as you lose your money, happy that you stayed true to yourself, or you can find a different card.
I don't know what that card looks like. Accusations of anti-semitism were very powerful against Corbyn, groomer discourse seems to get somewhere. To be honest, I think it's too late for the UK - we've imported too many immigrants and we have too few children. We are going to be cursed with a permanent disaffected ethnic minority and the resultant identity politics from now on and I can't see anything we can do about it in the time left. So it goes, I guess.
But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong.
*I have a strong feeling that you are going to say, "Nope, you can say and do whatever you like. That's your decision, and the consequences will be whatever they are." Bugger that. There was a time I didn't have to self-immolate to have a sensible conversation and I want that time back, please. And call me a coward, but if I'm going to kamikaze I want a reasonable estimated return on investment.
Say rather, it will not maximize material outcomes when you are the only one doing it.
On the other hand, nothing good will ever happen unless a critical mass of people do it.
Further, no critical mass is possible if everyone else is waiting for others to do it first.
Finally, there are things more important than maximized material outcomes.
The game-theoretic logic you are describing is doomed. People adopting this logic is why everything is going to shit. It cannot make things better, only worse. Self-immolation is not necessary, yet, but what will keep it at bay is for people to live by worthwhile axioms, rather than sinking to the level of their environment. That doesn't mean walking into the office and laying down truth-bombs until you're dragged bodily from the premises. It does mean figuring out what your principles are, and living by them, regardless of the outcome.
There is a problem with your claim. Game-theory was once the best argument in favor of individualism. Game theory predicted that communism would fail because of the incentives. If people had been ready to ignore their own interests for the greater good, then individualism would have had a harder time. And how do you justify the sacrifices for individualism, if you are individualistic? It seems to me it makes no sense.
I think it touches the core of the problem, the heart of the internal contradiction of the american patriotism (or any kind of disinterested attachment to individualism). On one side, there is the individualism that you have learnt to love, and on the other side the attachment that you feel for it; you feel it so strongly that you are ready to sacrifice yourself for it. The problem is that both are contradictory.
Game theory is individualistic (it assumes everyone follows his own interests), yet it predicts that individualism will sometime be sub-optimal. It's like saying that saving America requires more state intervention, but more state intervention will destroy what America stands for. If what I just said is true, then America (or the world individualist party if you prefer) is doomed.
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Fair enough. Serious question: What is your plan for obtaining a critical mass?
From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each. Those bodies exist in the vicinity of many, many other bodies and so, whether either of us like it or not, they must contend with game theory.
The power of tyranny comes from fear. Fear is generated and maintained by observing punishment. Every time someone stands up for their principles without a plan to survive doing so (or at least to extract net benefit), I believe they are making of themselves a sacrifice to feed what they hate. So the outcome matters. Whether your beliefs work in situ matters. I’m not arguing for nihilistic pursuit of gain, but I am arguing for pragmatism, and sacrificing your lower-level principles when they’re sabotaging your ultimate ones.
I think we are going to have to suffer. As long as you require a reasonable return on your investment you will remain hostage to the powers that be.
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I have a family, so that's a couple-dozen people right there. I have a church, which is upwards of a thousand more. I have a state and, at least nominally, a political party, and finally a tribe. All of these can be encouraged, strengthened, grown, built-up, in ways small and large. The best way to avoid the problems of atomic individualism is to not be an atomic individualist.
Fear is a choice. It works by threatening things, and leveraging your desire to preserve them. The truth, however, is nothing can in fact be preserved. Death comes to all men soon or late. Everything you have will one day soon be gone, and this realization can be internalized, to a lesser or greater extent. Doing so immunizes you against fear to the degree the internalization is successful.
I am all for being intelligent, understanding the reality of the situation, and having a plan. What I have found, personally, is that your plan needs to account for the very real possibility that you will suffer significant losses, and you need to make peace with that reality in advance. Here is an example of what that peace looks like, from a time when people were trying to deal with a novel emergent threat of apparently titanic proportions. If one cannot grasp this peace, fear will never cease to cast the deciding vote.
This is not, I think, something that Rationalism is good at, speaking at least from my own meager attempts to apply it. Rationalism is about winning, about optimization, about superior planning leading to everything working out after all. This is one of the major reasons why I don't think Rationalism is actually a workable approach to cognition; it doesn't seem to encourage the sort of gambles that life requires, and its obsession with calculation self-defeats due to unaccounted errors.
In any case, some values are subordinate to others, true enough. But terminal values are not created equal, and "survival" is a very poor and quite doomed one. "Success" is not much better. "Defiance" is better than either, and "Virtue" better still.
After the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, people were criticizing rationalism/EA for the exact opposite reason, i.e., that it encouraged him to take a gamble and risk major losses just because the expected value was positive, and that without rationalism/EA he would have been more risk-averse.
Stupid, illegal bets with other peoples' money != doing the right thing even if the evidence indicates it's going to cost you dearly. The arguments I saw about SBF's gambles rather underscored the point: I recall people claiming that the fraud made sense by EA principles, because even though he and his business got burned, he donated a lot of money first (apologies if this is misrepresenting the arguments, but it's my basic recollection). This is very, very far from anything I would recognize as "doing the right thing because it's right, even at significant cost, even with no reasonable expectation of a payoff." For starters, it's the difference between accepting hardship and inflicting hardship on others. I can see how hardcore utilitarians might disagree, but that's one of the reasons I'm not a utilitarian.
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Will any of these groups stand with you if you go against larger society? I've found not only will they not, but the opposite is true. Family is not support but control and hostages; if your family cannot directly coerce you, you will be coerced into going along by implicit or explicit threats of harm to them if they continue (e.g. if you lose your job how will you support them?). Other organizations will warn you not to make trouble because it reflects on them, and expel you if you continue regardless. They may claim to support your position but in fact they will tell you it's not worth it to fight any particular battle. And of course they're right, because the juggernaut state can crush them as easily as it can crush you.
You can 'solve' the problem of atomic individualism by not being an atomic individualist. But that just replaces it with the problem of being a collectivist, which is that nobody gets a say except the head of an independently-powerful faction.
Yes, they will.
I'll get a different job. In the meantime, my parents and siblings, and my wife's, and members of our church will be happy to house us.
Some organizations will do that, definately. Not my church, I don't think, at least not for reasons I wouldn't consider valid before the fact, and hence would not engage in.
The crushing seems to be slowing of late, and much remains un-crushed. In any case: "If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up." And also: "The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one".
What victory are you, personally, willing to accept other than one that comes at no cost to your comfort? If there's a fight and my side wins but we're stuck living with the damage long-term, I can live with that. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that you are not, because long-term diminished standards of living re just another form of loss to you. Am I mistaken?
Then you get a lot more support than I have ever seen. Perhaps you are simply higher status; in any organization I have been in, the organization's needs (meaning those of the people running it) come first, second, and last.
I no longer believe in victory.
I could live with that as well, but your side seems mostly unwilling to fight and if they did would likely be unable to win. Those on your side in power hold to principles the other side cynically turns against them, even to the point where they enforce those principles against their own side but not the other (e.g. see the recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act). The rest retreat believing that perhaps THIS TIME, they will not be chased... and if they are, well, there's always victory after death, as both you and Hlynka have claimed. I'm not religious and not a born Red Tribe person; I have nowhere to retreat to and I do not believe in anything after death.
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