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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   32429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 7, 2025

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I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.

What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.

There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.

Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!

The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?

So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?

Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.

But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.

Great! You start. What do you like about America as it now exists?

There's something a little funny about this depressing rant about how negatively-biased navel-gazing intellectuals have demoralized America with their depressing rants. "The Root Cause of all the bad things happening is our demoralization, and the Root Cause of our demoralization is everyone going around pointing out the Root Causes of how bad things are!"

The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible.

To this list I would add earlier examples: the War on Drugs. They won, and there was never any serious chance of any other outcome. No serious effort was ever made to achieve victory, or even to define victory in a way that was achievable. Enforcement was always somewhere between haphazard and hopelessly arbitrary. At no point, even at the height of mass incarceration, did upper class degenerates succeed in giving everyone the impression that they didn't want or couldn't get drugs. Spreading Democracy, I grew up with it understood that this was part of America's mission in the world, then at some point we just kind of gave up on it. Iraq was part of the problem, but worse than that was coming to accept China's totalitarianism wasn't going anywhere. We just kinda gave up on these goals, like the War on Poverty, the effort to spread capitalist prosperity, environmentalism, space exploration. They seemed to just fizzle out.

As for solutions? I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job:

At the pet store he picked out two painted turtles, each about as big around as a mayonnaise-jar lid. He bought them a large kidney shaped dish that had its own little island, a plastic palm tree, some aquatic plants, and a snail. The snail, presumably, to bolster the self-esteem of the turtles: “You think we’re slow? Look at that guy.” To shore up the snail’s morale in the same way, there was a rock. Everyone is happier if they have someone to look down on, as well as someone to look up to, especially if they resent both. This is not only the Beta Male strategy for survival, but the basis for capitalism, democracy, and most religions.

Americans need a hierarchy. The Great Chain of Being brings comfort to all. Who you want to put at the top, and who at the bottom, is less important than that everyone needs to feel that their status can be raised above someone else's through their efforts. In my mind, the problem of so many NEETs is that when hitting on a girl, one is almost better off being unemployed and a charming slacker or daring criminal, than saying one works an entry level job at Amazon or McDonald's or wheeling dirt around a construction site. Work doesn't seem like it will significantly increase one's status. This is why things like exercise are such red-pilling experiences for so many men: they combine natural and inevitable hierarchy (someone is faster than you and someone is slower), and change in that status from one's own efforts (you move up or down in the hierarchy). We have to eliminate the sense of learned helplessness.

I often return to the wisdom of Christopher Moore in his comedy novel A Dirty Job

Totally unrelated, but it is always great to find a fellow Christopher Moore fan. He is probably the best comedic author after Pratchett and is criminally underappreciated.

No kidding! I LOVED him as a teenager, I actually drove to a college in New Jersey with my mother when Fool came out to watch him stage a live reading with the college Shakespeare company, they'd do scenes from Fool juxtaposed with King Lear. I keep meaning to do reread Lamb to do a write up here.

Lamb is his masterpiece. To make a die hard atheist like me to think "This is the jesus I would like to know better" is quite an achievement.

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