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The "masculinity crisis" is probably down mostly to the traditional foundations of masculine identity, what distinguished it fundamentally from femininity going back several thousand years at least, e.g being physically powerful and being good at killing people/animals are less and less relevant than ever in industrial and post-industrial society and are only going to become more so.
Probably not actually "fixable" short of a Kaczsynskian collapse of civilization and why all proposed solutions whether they be left-wing "build a positive masculinity" stuff or right-wing "retvrn" will fail.
This is discounting the fact that we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence.
Indeed this is what most critiques of traditionalism and twitter emulators miss when they caricature it as RETVRN. Tradition is never going back to the past, going backwards or trying to literally go back to past glories, and whenever it is that it fails. Because it is impossible to turn back entropy, because we are not people of the past, we have neither their virtues nor their vices, neither their innocence nor their wisdom.
What tradition is is acknowledgement of eternal truths and their practical, moral, social and metaphysical requirements.
In this case, the fiction you, and modernism, sells of a peaceful society created by industry is a blatant lie. One all too evident now. We do not live in peace, we do not live in civilization, we have only grown more base and brutal with the advent of plenty and the inevitable cthonic pull that came with it. That brutality is sheathed in nice even language and plentiful fast food and video games. But even those are fading and drifting out of grasp under the current of debt, slowly but inevitably moving away like the ship of a lone sailor who dropped overboard and has to resign himself to drowning.
What is more cruel and violent than the plain imposition that you will never own your home, you will never have a loving wife, you will never have a loyal husband, you will never sire children and all you will ever do is pay for pensions working a job you hate while your black rectangle beams images of happier people into your mind as everything in your vicinity including your own life gets slowly but surely worse in every regard. Perhaps the threat of the punishment that awaits you if you dare to contest such a fate?
Some societies treated slaves with more decency than modern man commends in all areas that are not commodified material comfort. But alas, the choice between annihilation and annihilation is not going to tame the youths spirit for very long.
Is is entirely predictable that such an age should be dominated by feminine thinking and modes of existence. But no age is eternal and the troubles created by the desolation of all social structures that require will necessarily wreak the advent of a new age of conquest and grandiose virility.
Our bandit hordes are already here. The warlords that will tame them have already been born. And when they do, earthly notions of equality, sameness and tolerance will go with them.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
Being eaten by wolves. Having your head bashed in by a rival war party. Pretty much any given day in the life of a pre-modern man. On feast days Russian peasants used to get drunk and beat each other senseless for fun, and then go home and beat their wives. This is just "words are violence" but right-wing.
Actually none of what you describes strikes me as a fraction as unpleasant as the life of the average person a few centuries ago, which is probably why humanity collectively abandoned that lifestyle as soon as it was materially feasible. "A job you hate" is not fun but it's probably more fun than starving to death because there was a bad frost and the crops all died.
As for "everything slowly but surely getting worse in every regard" idk what specifically you have in mind but most right-wing complaints about everything getting worse are just tautological complaints that everything is getting less right-wing which naturally isn't convincing to anyone who doesn't already buy into all right-wing premises.
It hasn't. Cyclical theories of history were always bullshit, though they may have been facially plausible in 1800 . Humanity is in entirely uncharted territory. The past offers no lessons, because it actually is different this time. Modern people aren't 16th century peasants. They aren't even 20th century proletarians.
All of the "weak men strong times" stuff, the idea that the stultifying atmosphere of modernity will ultimately lead to some great revolt for the restoration of meaning, virtue, whatever, none of it has any contact with reality. Angsting about meaning is itself a luxury available to the excessively wealthy, as everyone is in modern developed countries by western standards. Approximately nobody is going to forsake material comfort to embark on some great vitalist crusade, because material comfort is what most people actually care about first and foremost. Even people who are "struggling" today live like kings compared to the average person 100 years ago, let alone 200.
It would take a total collapse of industrial civilization to produce the global warlordism that you dream of, and that's possible, though I don't think it's very likely.
I don't even know what "we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence" would actually even look like in practice. Like a based fascist party takes over the US tomorrow and then, what, invades Mexico for fun? Resurrects gladiatorial combat? Nukes China?
I remember when right-wing twitter personality Alaric the Barbarian made a post about how young men need GREATNESS and ADVENTURE and should not settle for the drudgery of living in suburban Indianopolis and someone reasonably said yeah posting photos of Greek statues and larping as a Germanic warlord is cool and everything but what actually are you concretely suggesting people do and he replied uhhh run for dogcatcher.
Because you have a solely material understanding of what is good. This is the only charge against the Enlightenment that sticks, and yes it sticks just as well when Marx says it than when Evola says it. The life created by the unrestrained mercantile impulse is inhuman and torrents of blood have already been unleashed to tamper its excesses or realize its promises. All in vain so far.
If you refuse to see the problem and desire to place you head in the sand of "our system is the best to the exclusion of all others" I have nothing to say to you. Conservatism of this sort is the ideology of the damned. Change is an eternal constant that will sweep such views as it has any others.
This is a specious argument. Morality is necessarily partial.
I can give descriptive accounts of many things, but they don't cross the is-ought gap. And any crossing is going to engender such partiality. Good that it does, because that is how we can recognize good from evil.
When Ted complains that the world is crushing the freedom and actualization of the individual, you can decide to call this right wing and oppose this slander of the industrial system because it's not fair on abstract power structures. I choose to recognize that it is true and should inform the conduct of moral men who interact with industrial society, because I'm constitutionally biased in favor of individual human welfare and I think people who aren't so biased are morally deficient.
We can still discuss descriptivisms of course.
I'm still waiting on serious refutations of Spengler, Sorokin, Glubb or Toynbee. Hell, I'm waiting on anybody to even attempt refuting Vico with any real arguments.
All that the literature shows is sneers, sweeping under the rug of political convenience and displeasure at the reality of historical patterns in the favor of a biased form of relativism that changes its favor with the winds of power. Hard hitting philosophical criticism I have not come by yet.
Vico is right. And people who dismiss his insight are behaving like creationists who cling to specific dismissals, attempt to refute specifics individually without considering the whole or grasp at epistemological traps to refuse to acknowledge the plain truth because the big picture shatters their own personal intuitions. When they don't just lie that is.
All Empires collapse. All Empires think they are eternal. You are not special.
I disagree, mainly because you are taking my words too literally and envisioning warlordism in a sense that you would historically recognize. Much like the people who are waiting in vain for a civil war complete with banners and uniforms will remain in wait forever. Things are not this way anymore. And yet they are eternally the same.
But even if we are to take such literal interpretation, it doesn't necessitate at all collapse of civilization. Not by a longshot. And you'd know this if you had lived in politically unstable countries as I have.
Lybia has electricity right now. It also has (marginal) slavery and no monopoly on violence. What would collapse in more violent circumstances is the current order of power. Institutions at large needn't be as radically affected as you seem to think.
Why shouldn't I? I don't believe honor, glory, virtue, or tradition exist as real transcendentals beyond the human mind, and I place no value on them. They are only fictions whose persistence is simply because they produce a pleasant (and ultimately, physiological and material) sensation in the bodies of those who cling to them, and because they are useful tools to organize society in a way that also produces pleasant (and again, physiological and material) sensations in those same people. This isn't really an argument against liking those fictions, there's no rational argument why someone shouldn't, but there's no rational argument why someone should either, unless they already do. I believe the same thing about fictions from the opposite side of the aisle like freedom, democracy, equality, and tolerance, but you probably agree with me on that.
I don't think Marx ever made that charge.
Inhuman meaning what? "The life" by which I imagine you mean the general state of society over the past several centuries was certainly created by humans, what exactly makes it inhuman? Is it just a personal distaste for it?
I oppose it because I think talk of freedom and actualization is mostly gobbledygook, like the aforementioned honor and equality and tolerance and glory. What Kaczynski is saying when you strip it all away is just "I don't like industrial society because it makes me upset" which is fine, but it doesn't make me upset, so we've reached an impasse, because I can't imagine any argument which would cause me to privilege what makes Ted Ted Kaczynski upset/not upset over what makes me upset/not upset.
Well I've never read Vico and didn't know who he was before you told me. The "Course of Nations" section of The New Science on internet archive is only about fifty pages; can I get away with reading that or do I have to read the whole thing? What specific insights did he have that have yet to be disproven?
Sure. But that's not the only perspective, and it doesn't have a serious claim to universalism or consensus.
I disagree. And I think this part of the modernist position robs people of something important that is an inherent part of the human condition. I don't really think we can convince each other on that point.
Marx's specific criticism of capital is that it blew up the old ways of being without placing any guardrails on Greed and immiserated the lower classes by turning them from peasants with a manner of dignity into the miserable cogs of the capitalist machine. His will is explicitly to craft a religious weapon to realize the promises of the liberal bourgeoisie against their will.
Communism does not see itself as reactionary because it embraces Hegelian dialectics, but it is originally and specifically motivated by the failures of the Enlightenment to realize the idealized vision of modernity that would liberate all.
Read Rousseau and then read Marx. It is clear as water.
Read the Autonomy and Surrogate Activities sections of ISAIF and you'll get a precise idea what I mean. Man wasn't meant for email jobs. To cater to your materialism I would say that man is not adapted to such things because they are too recent. Memetic evolution has outpaced biological evolution by too much and created too much tension in its vessel.
I do not take the suffering of humanity for millennia to adapt to the specific needs of society to be a reasonable course of action. Tradition holds that society should conform to us and our nature in its design. The precise opposite of progress politics which is always looking to create New Man.
Well then there is very little for us to agree on. I can't really convince you of a visceral feeling. Explaining freedom and actualization is like explaining a joke or an artistic experience, it's only ever indirect unless you've felt it.
Build a table from scratch until you get a result you like, and then tell me that the feeling you are getting isn't real and what really matters is what's in the spreadsheets with a straight face. I personally regard that faith in numbers and quantity to be the absurd superstition.
it would be best if you could read some of the scholarship around him, but ultimately if you draw out various theories of cyclical history (including the authors I've listed and others) you get overlaps that all fit into Vico's theory, which I would say is the most complete one. He doesn't go into some of the specifics other authors do (such as how collapse happen, or who founds civilizations or others minutiae), but his own broad theory is the matrix of all cyclical histories hence, and it is all very solidly supported by further scholarship on the topic. And unlike with Spengler, you don't need to read tomes of German poetic prose to get to the point. Italians really are underappreciated in their philosophical clarity.
I'm not sure his style will appeal to your materialist biases however, Sorokin's Social and Cultural Dynamics or other modernist instances of the idea may be more your speed.
I think this is mostly accurate but the main thing that separates Marx from the reactionaries is that he believed that fundamentally the liberal bourgeois revolutions and the transformation of the peasantry into industrial proletarians was ultimately a good thing.
What I believe Kaczynski misses here is that the humans of industrial society are not the humans of pre-industrial society. Even if we assume a pre-industrial hunter gatherer would give an "8" if asked "how fulfilled are you?" and a modern office worker would give a "5," that doesn't mean the office worker would report an "8" if made to live the life of the hunter gatherer.
I also don't buy that humanity at large is "suffering." In some ways, sure, but this suffering is not particularly greater than the suffering has ever been. How would this would even be measured in theory?
Spreadsheets are not enjoyable and there are other things I find enjoyable like reading, exercise, or wasting time on the internet. If you want to call that actualization you can, but there's nothing special or essential about this feeling. Probably some people do like spreadsheets. "People have to do unpleasant tasks" is not a unique flaw of modernity. I think I would feel much less actualized if I was an illiterate farmer who never got to read an interesting book in his life. The oppression of nature is not preferable to the oppression of industry and the modern state; it's much worse.
I don't really consider myself a strict materialist. There are obviously some immaterial entities that exist like numbers or logical laws and maybe even more, which is why I don't even consider myself an atheist, but I don't see any reason to include human ideological constructs like the ones I've mentioned in that category.
Notably, traditionalists mostly believe these revolutions, though massive tragedies, to also have been inevitable.
This is where linear and cyclical time meet. Change is the constant and all regimes are transitory. Hegel things we are synthesizing the perfect regime through these transitions, Calvin that we are descending to the depths of sin until redemption, and Aristotle that we are just playing out endless seasons.
Change is a good thing. It is good that winter follows autumn or summer would never happen. But winter is still harsh and terrible.
I don't think you can make a convincing argument that this is true. Evolution on the genetic level is not that fast, and we can see in all the pathologies of modern life precisely the maladies of people who have crafted en environment they are not suited to both psychologically and physiologically. This is what Ted denounces, that we made our bed of autism and tooth decay and are decided to invent and sell solutions to the problems we created that only make us less adapted to our environment. And Land may be right that really we are terraforming Earth for something else. But that something else is not humanity.
I don't like that. I think we can have technology without this problem. And that the way to do this is to reembrace what we have always done to moderate the excesses that have led us here and embrace a wholesome view of our nature.
I couldn't disagree more. You may as well say there is nothing special or essential about the feeling you get when you are interacting with a great piece of art.
So you are a Kantian of sorts. What is then your stance on Natural Law?
This is a common critique ("We are creating problems which we then have to solve") but I don't really see what the issue with that is. What's wrong with creating new problems and then solving them with new methods?
I doubt it. I think Marx was right at least that culture and society are largely a reflection of underlying material conditions. The customs and morals that developed in a pastoral society 3000 years ago cannot be freely transplanted onto the 21st century. If they could, it would not last very long. And I doubt there are new moral systems that could be developed to significantly ameliorate the problems of modernity. The only salvation is to hope humanity can technologize itself out of the novel problems it's created for itself by earlier technologizing, and I don't see any problem with that.
Well, I agree with that too. I don't think there's anything qualitatively different between the enjoyment a person gets from watching Marvel slop #28493 and beholding the Reims Cathedral. And I say that as someone who doesn't like Marvel movies and would probably prefer visiting the Reims Cathedral.
I'm vaguely familiar with both the Lockean kind and the Aristotlean kind from readings in college and a few Catholic apologist books, but I don't recall being convinced by the idea that metaphysical rights or duties of any sort exist.
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