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Cthulhu always swims right.
A common argument that pops up from time to time is that history generally moves in one direction. One prominent example of this historically has been Whig history, which has a narrative of human society generally moving from a barbaric past to an enlightened present. People like MLK Jr. have implicitly endorsed this view with the quote "the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice". It's a nice idea... but it's clearly wrong when you bother to think about it. People believe their current values are where true justice lies, and their current values are highly predicated on their environment whenever they grew up. Nobody can look into the future, so we look to the past instead, and it's a story of people gradually becoming closer and closer to our present selves. But if we had the capability to look into the future, there's a good chance that we'd be shocked or horrified about where we eventually end up. People in 2000 BCE would probably think our present world in 2024 CE is terrible in a number of ways. Neither side is correct or incorrect, it's just a difference in the baseline.
Given the negativity bias of the internet, more recent takes on "history generally moves in one direction" can mostly be summarized as "[thing] generally gets [worse]". One example is conservatives telling you how progressives always eventually win on basically everything. One popularization of this idea is "Cthulhu always swims left", which people have claimed on this site many times, example 1, example 2, example 3, example 4, etc. If you’ve been on this site for long, then you’ve almost certainly encountered this idea at least once. This rebuttal is a better critique than I could ever give. The gist is that things only look like this if you gerrymander history in a pessimistically partisan way. Yes, progressives always win if you only include their wins and exclude all of their losses… duh? But that’s a goofy way to cut history. Conservatives might then try to come up with reasons to handwave away any progressive losses, either as trivial (“they lose the small things but win where it counts”) or as simply delayed (“they haven’t won… yet!”). But these are never particularly convincing to an unbiased observer. History really doesn’t move consistently in any direction but the most vague and basic ones, and trying to force it into this box or that serves as little more than a glimpse into that person’s pessimism.
Freddie deBoer posted an article today that espoused that idea that “Cthulhu always swims left”, but flipped so that, effectively, “Cthulhu always swims right”. He doesn’t say those exact words, but that’s his general conclusion. In the aftermath of Harris’ defeat, many in the Democratic party are claiming that the party needs to move to the center after being too far left for many years. Americans mostly agree with this idea, but the remaining leftists like FdB are horrified at that conclusion. To people like them, Harris basically ran as a Republican, and so saying that the party needs to go even further right is anathema. If this all sounds utterly ridiculous… I wouldn’t disagree with you. Saying the country always moves right shares all the flaws as those saying it always moves left. I explicitly disagree with this piece, but I still think it serves as a useful example of what it’s like when the sides are reversed.
Sorry to dismiss a high-effort argument with a one-liner, but: so "meaningless" that he'll fight to the death for (at least one of) them, and literally ban all discussion of them on his Substack because his audience refuses to agree with him.
My offer to these "the culture war is distraction" people is always the same: you get the economy, or whatever else you find "meaningful", I get total uncontested control over culture - deal?
I think the biggest problem with this proposal is that I don't think there are easy levers to just control culture. That, plus the fact that some cultures might not be able to support some kinds of economic systems. Like can a trad maximalist culture really support a globalist socialist economy, for example?
If we're entering this politically impossible situation where @ArjinFerman gets these powers, it's fairly easy. Does he want to reverse the sexual revolution, as a random example? Illegalize over-the-counter contraceptives and abortion clinics. Mandate >90% male:female ratio in colleges and technical schools. Remove mandatory maternity leave and allow discrimination against female hires. End no fault divorce. Lower welfare benefits for single people (Edit: Perhaps this falls under 'economy', so nix this.) Done and dusted.
The CRA is a fairly modest law that radically reshaped American culture over time. With a literal culture czar, you could steer the country at least that effectively.
But will the people accept that? When I say there's no easy levers, I'm thinking about how hard it would be to enforce some of these things in practice.
The US struggles to stop illegal drugs from coming over the border from Mexico. How would we stop oral arbortifacients and condoms from coming over the Southern border? How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics - and stop employers from letting these qualified women work for them? How would we stop women from poisoning husbands they can't divorce?
I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to be brutal and efficient here, but I'm not actually sure the state capacity to do all of this actually exists.
LOL. With the full power of the culture (and a not-insubstantial portion of law) pushing women into technical subjects, engineering and computer science remains skewed 4:1 male. Take that away, and you will be able to maintain 9:1 ratios with no problem at all.
I'm not talking about STEM. I'm talking about all of college and technical/trade schools.
If the people want to resist your lawful efforts to change the culture, how do you stop women and sympathetic men from creating university alternatives where women are trained in a field and then hired even without a degree? Like, how do you actually put the genie back in the bottle here?
How do you stop people from creating samizdat, and passing down trades within their familes and a dozen other things that people who remember the old regime will want to do?
Umm, how many of the women in non-STEM college majors are there to study and how many of them are taking a vacation for four years? It certainly seems like very high percentages of the latter.
Of course the real problem is that for non-underclass women, there is no alternative to a college degree. You don’t see female plumbers and cops and infantrymen and the most reliable route to being a housewife is… through college.
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The idea of society organizing bottom-up in such a manner, on a scale that is any kind of threat, is kind of dubious to start with. The way universities work and what they teach has lots of detractors too nowadays, they even have dedicated alternatives, but none of it adds up to anything.
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STEM education is difficult and people who are doing it are too busy to teach it; this also applies to trades, and they have other requirements anyway.
As the jobs become less technical, the advantage yielded by those who could train their children is correspondingly diminished.
Market forces. Because the credential spiral is mostly fake, and there's nothing of significance that separates a worker with an Arts degree from one that only graduated high school, this will impose a ceiling on the price of labor for those with a fake degree.
As far as "training in a field and then hired without a degree", this is another way to state that they're receiving the level of education that much more closely matches the demands of the job; this is better for the students, and it's better for the part of society that isn't employed in academia. It's a good thing that academia did not spend 50 years agitating for a destruction of wages for those without degrees or anything like that, or they could be in real trouble.
Trades are already captured by licensing boards and apprenticeship requirements. Some of what they teach is fake, but not to anywhere near the same degree as academia in general, and you get paid which offsets some of the cost.
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