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On the culture war and the dark arts of communication
How does the average person come to believe certain messages communicated to them about the culture war? The easiest answer is that this process happens sub or semi-consciously. As Moldbug's Cathedral points out, raising an individual from cradle to majority (or beyond) within a certain world view will, intentionally or unintentionally, impart that world view upon him to a greater or lesser degree. But I am interested in more specific and more practical answers.
We all spend a great deal of time and effort writing and arguing about the culture war but it seems obvious to me that most of the effort remains within a small community and its not in a form suitable for general consumption. But how can it be made suitable?
For example, given adult literacy (see here for examples of the levels) and IQ, what types, lengths, and complexities of messages is a person able to understand? And which of those messages become adopted as personal beliefs?
Take Moldbug or Marx. Clearly, the writings of either author are beyond the reach of the average person. What rules would guide the translation of these works into a form consumable by the average person? How many pieces would their works have to be broken up into? How many ideas could be contained in each piece? How many interactions with a given idea are necessary for a person to understand or agree with it? What grade-level should the text be written in? What tone or voice should be used? What changes are more effective for different segments of the population, men, women, rural, urban, etc.?
Surely there are people skilled in the dark arts of communication, advertising, and psychology which know how to translate* the sorts of things we discuss into a form consumable by the average person. Given that these disciplines are not new, surely there is a handbook of basic principles for crafting such messages? Do we have any practitioners of the dark arts that can provide such resources?
*I looked for an AI that can translate a given text into a text of substantially similar meaning but at a specified (lower) grade level. I have not found any such tool.
The archetypal format of arguing your position is a debate, not a manifesto, not even a dumbed-down one. Today that probably means some podcast interview. In principle, it's not hard to argue any right-winger take on a podcast convincingly. This isn't rocket science.
I've just watched Jared Taylor make an unbelievably anodyne case for White Supremacy to some Japanese interviewers in simple words a low-literacy layman could understand and nod do. He could do that because his audience was evidently sympathetic and polite to a fault.
A typical popular American debate (to say nothing of worse debate environments) on a politically fraught topic is very different, it consists either of empty blathering and sloganeering or walking on eggshells, and you need a heck of a lot more rhetorical skill to not break any, not get bogged down in interruptions, gotchas and «mask slipping» type attacks. Even if you're that good, by the time you're done with your little eggshell dance and ready to deliver the conclusion, the average listener has long tired of it and switched channels. And the smart listener's time is too expensive for this shit. And what you're left with is either dysfunctional obsessive fanatics or lukewarm information consumers. Not much of a platform, so why bother.
The tragedy is that as a CW-minoritarian and a suspected witch, you have to be leagues better than your opponents who have been given license to uncharitable assumptions and plain savagery in public, and the water level keeps rising as your arguments are added to hate speech checklists and become the setup for gotchas, so you need to run on euphemism threadmill or keep getting fucking better. Being in the right helps, of course, against the more ludicrous and artificially propped-up beliefs; but on the other hand, your opponents have access to institutions of sense-making and memetic engineering. And if that fails, they turn to means of demonization, bullying and deplatforming so you cannot propagate your agenda effectively.
This exhausts people and they leave.
But one shouldn't look down on laymen too much. In a less adversarial situation, an average person wouldn't struggle with understanding e.g. Moldbug, if Moldbug were to be distilled to the standard of a high school essay. Our friend JB did just that once, in fact. Of course, Moldbug when distilled shrinks to truisms, trivialities and a bunch of ludicrous unsupported claims. But he becomes plenty understandable.
To the extent that he does not, this is because of obscurantism, which is a valuable feature of the doctrine, seeing as it helps with building the stratified, loyal movement/cult.
Likewise with Marxism.
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