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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Ever since I first read The Selfish Gene I have been fascinated by the idea of a "cognitive ecology". That is the concept of ideas themselves as organisms that breed/evolve. That ideas themselves could be described as "predatory" or "symbiotic". That different ideas might vary in their evolutionary fitness and be specially adapted to different information environments, or to fill an "ecological niche".

With this in mind, what Hlinkians such as @Dean and @FCfromSSC appear to be describing is a Taxonomical Ranking of ideologies with "International Socialist" (Communists), "National Socialist" (Nazis/Fascists), and "Intersectional Progressivism" all as Species within the Genus "Rousseauidae" which itself resides within the Family "Western Enlightenment".

While it may be reasonable to claim that this Taxonomical model isn't "a good way of dividing up different ideologies." or that "it's just something Hlynka latched onto because it seemed like a good way of putting all his enemies onto one side" I do not think that it is reasonable to call it "incoherent". Besides, it being "bad" is just like your opinion man.

I think that the issue a lot of people here had (have?) with Hlinka and his ideas is that he essentially presented an "outside context problem". His politics weren't incoherent as much as they were Alien.

I was actually just thinking about this in the context of @OliveTapenade's comment on @KulakRevolt in the Snow White thread last week. Where one extolls "rejecting modernity" "embracing violence" from a comfortable office the other talks about that time he surreptitiously pulled a gun on a police officer durring a traffic stop while praying to avoid violence. The two might as well have come from different planets.

Even though they are both describing the same general category of behaviour, the symbolic role that violence plays in their model of the world is radically different. There are many ways to cash out what that means in practice - for one, for Kulak, violence in itself represents a kind of success, a triumph over our sheepish instincts, whereas for the other, violence in itself is a failure, an undesired last resort that always carries a terrible cost. Either way, it means that the worldviews just don't translate into each other neatly. The whole world of moral assumptions around, say, Orestes choosing to engage in retributive violence to avenge his father is invisible and alien to the modern reactionary.

Violence is an extreme example, but I daresay there are similar clashing worldviews in other politics. Probably the one I've run into most often today is the concept of revolution, where even though two people may both be talking about the overthrow and replacement of a particular political establishment, the invisible worlds of assumptions around it are so divergent as to almost untranslatable.

At risk of spiderman-pointing, your objection was known within nietzscheanism since Nietzsche himself, who had read the original texts a whole lot. He argued that the greeks extolled restraint because they were so virile and considered that the natural state of things.

Taxonomical Ranking of Ideologies... I like that metaphor. Thank ye.