@naraburns comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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FtttG 13hr ago · Edited 13hr ago

Last week there was an interesting discussion about a brewing backlash against polyamory in rationalist circles. I theorised that this was an inevitable result of the rationalist movement growing to the point that it included many “normies”, and that while polyamory might work pretty well for the first-generation rationalists who were abnormal on one or more axes (gay, trans, asexual, autistic etc.), it will probably not work for people who are comparatively normal: just because something works well for oddballs, that doesn’t necessarily generalise to it working well for the more conventionally-minded. Specifically, I think that polyamory is unlikely to work well for anyone who experiences a typical amount of sexual jealousy, a category that asexual people almost definitionally do not fall into (or so I assume).

This got me thinking about Rob Henderson’s theory about luxury beliefs. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the gist is that Henderson thinks that the greater affordability of material goods and democratisation of fashion styles means that Veblen goods are no longer an effective signalling mechanism that a person is a member of the elite (when cars are so expensive that most people can't afford them, owning a car is a costly signal that you are rich; when they become so cheap that everyone can afford them, the only way you can stand out is by buying a really expensive one, and the visual difference between a Tesla and a used Honda isn't half as distinct as the difference between have and have-not). As an alternative signal of how cultured and educated they are, elites instead promote outré-sounding ideas which sound crazy to the average person, but putting these ideas into practice has devastating consequences for anyone who isn’t an elite. The reason these ideas aren’t devastating for elites is either that:

while they promote them in the abstract, they don’t practise them themselves e.g. Ivy League-educated people talking about how marriage is an oppressive patriarchal construct and praising people who experiment with “alternative family structures” – while they personally waited to get married before having children, and have a family structure which would seem unsurprising to a time-traveller from 1950s America; or
they do practise the ideas themselves, but their wealth insulates them from the consequences that would befall a poorer person who practised them (it's easy to be an advocate for defunding the police if you live in a gated community)

Regardless of what you think of the luxury beliefs concept (I know that @ymeskhout, formerly of these parts, vociferously disagrees with the entire framing), the discussion about polyamory has got me thinking of a related idea, the general case of which polyamory is a specific example. Essentially, it boils down to alternative social practices or lifestyle choices that share the following traits:

if practised by a person who is weird or abnormal,¹ it will work better than adhering to the status quo
if practised by a person who is comparatively normal, it will be disastrous compared to adhering to the status quo
weird and abnormal people start doing the alternative lifestyle choice, find that it legitimately works great for them (much better than the “normal” thing they were doing before, or could have done instead), and become proselytizers for the cause, effusively telling everyone they know how much the alternative lifestyle choice has improved their lives and encouraging them to give it a try (optionally being a bit more cautious and responsible about this, admitting that it might come with downsides or acknowledging that it may not work for everybody)
the alternative lifestyle choice takes off in popularity, but some people quickly find that it isn’t improving their lives as much as they were promised, or may be actively ruining their lives
but because our society glorifies being weird and different, and scorns being conventional (using terms like “normie”, “basic” etc.), lots of people refuse to admit that the reason the alternative lifestyle choice isn’t working for them is because they’re a relatively conventional person, and keep trying to “push through” their initial discomfort in order to reach the point at which the lifestyle choice actually will improve their lives. This quickly leads to a sunk-cost fallacy, and by the time they realise they’re a normal person for whom the alternative lifestyle choice simply doesn’t work, the damage may be severe and irreparable.

Offhand, I can think of a few alternative lifestyle choices other than polyamory which I think meet this description:

Gender transition: In spite of my undisguised incredulity towards gender ideology and towards the hysterical claims about how medical transition is “lifesaving treatment” (and hence that denying it to someone who wants it is no different from denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient) – in spite of all that, I do believe that there may be rare cases in which certain people stand to benefit from medical transition, and may see an attenuation of mental distress and improved quality of life as a result. The operative word in that sentence being “rare”. In the West, the rates of people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria have skyrocketed over the past two decades, and even medics who work in this space are belatedly coming to recognise that, for many of their patients, medical transition isn’t the silver bullet they advertised and may even exacerbate their suffering (a realisation they are struggling to rationalise away). Eliza Mondegreen catalogues some of the mental gymnastics said medics will resort to, along with heartbreaking examples of people who’ve undergone some form of social and/or medical transition and found their dysphoria worsening and their psychic distress increasing – but when they turn to communities of like-minded individuals for help, they are inevitably gaslit about how it has to get worse before it gets better (and how detransitioners are traitors to the cause upon whom death is wished – you wouldn’t want to be one of those people, would you?). I am comfortable saying that, for the majority of people who have medically transitioned in the past two decades, their quality of life has probably disimproved, whether marginally or drastically; while a minority has seen their quality of life improve.
Sex-positive feminism: Closely related to the original polyamory example, there is a widespread set of cultural messages which present casual sex, kink, group sex, multiple concurrent sexual partners etc. as the path to female empowerment, and which encourage young women to experiment with them on that basis. While I have no objection to women engaging in these behaviours on moral grounds, and don't doubt that there are some women out there who derive just as much pleasure from casual sex as the modal man – nonetheless, a growing body of empirical evidence suggests that such woman are atypical, and that the modal woman’s self-esteem takes a hit after a one-night stand, while the modal man sees a boost to his. But because so much of sex-positive feminism explicitly or implicitly tells young women that being uninterested in casual sex is indicative of prudery (a message reinforced by every horny young man in their vicinity) and that regretting a one-night stand is indicative of “internalised misogyny” or whatever, many women continue practising casual sex long past the point at which it’s obvious that it’s making them miserable, as sadly documented in this post by a young Arab-American woman who avoided losing her virginity in college, while all of her female friends were repeatedly used and cast aside by their male peers. As much as I might deride the silliness of the term “demisexual”, I do understand that it might be the only way in the current cultural climate that a woman can express her preferences without being accused of being a “bad feminist”, or of slut-shaming her peers by implication.²
Drug liberalisation: I believe this was one of Rob Henderson’s canonical examples of luxury beliefs, but it fits here just as well. There are some people who can experiment with psychoactive substances without becoming addicted or developing psychotic symptoms, but these people are rare, and addictive pathways for normal people are predictable and well understood. For most people, experimenting with psychoactive substances will be a net-negative, and you should not gamble on being one of the weird people who can take a lot of LSD and see no ill effects. Ergo, drug liberalisation is almost certainly a net-negative for most people and hence for society as a whole. But our society shamelessly glorifies drug use as exciting and transcendent, so lots of people who should know better keep doing drugs long past the point at which they know they’re in the normie camp (and it’s not just the usual physical and psychological addiction causing them to stick with it, but also a whole host of modern messages about how drug use is the way to open up your third eye, that people who aren’t “420 friendly” are squares etc.).
Therapy: A hobby horse Freddie deBoer has been beating for years. Ever since Freud, therapy was generally understood as medical treatment, and going to a therapist when you weren’t mentally ill would have seemed about as logical as going to a GP when you didn’t feel sick. But in recent years, the idea that everyone should go to therapy, regardless of whether or not they’re in acute mental distress, has been growing in popularity. Hand-in-hand with this idea is the more or less explicit denial that therapy can ever result in iatrogenic harm, a concept that everyone understands perfectly well in the context of any other kind of medical treatment: “either therapy will help you,” these people argue, “or at worst it will be ineffectual”. (I’m sure some people in the “everyone should go to therapy” camp would flatly deny that there exists a person, anywhere, who isn’t mentally ill: after all, if everyone has trauma, then by implication everyone experiences post-traumatic stress and in turn suffers from [complex] post-traumatic stress disorder. This may be a weakman but it is not a strawman.) In my opinion, we were right the first time around and therapy should be understood first and foremost as medical treatment for people suffering from mental illnesses (even being in mental distress isn’t in and of itself evidence of mental illness, as anyone recently bereaved can tell you, and the mental health industry’s casual conflation of the two is irresponsible and appalling). For those people, therapy may be hugely beneficial. Most people, however, do not suffer from mental illnesses as generally understood, and hence do not stand to benefit from therapy. If you’re one of the many people who doesn’t suffer from mental illness, therapy is likely to have either no impact on your life at all (aside from being a huge waste of time and money), or actively detrimental to your well-being (obsessively analysing and ruminating on all the things in your life that make you unhappy doesn’t sound a great recipe for happiness) and/or the well-being of people around you (e.g. narcissists who go to therapy and learn lots of handy tricks and terminology for how to manipulate the people around them and rationalise away their own bad behaviour). But because our culture shamelessly glorifies mental illness³ and heavily implies that people with mental illnesses are more exciting and interesting than people without (the new term for people with autistic traits is “neurospicy”, for fuck’s sake), lots of people keep going to therapy long past the point at which they should know full well that they’re not mentally ill and are just an ordinary person with ordinary problems.
“Follow your dreams”/do what you love: Sound advice, if you’re one of the tiny minority of people talented and/or attractive enough to make a living from acting/writing/music/sports/video game streaming/modelling/influencing etc., for whom working in a regular job would probably be a lot more frustrating and dissatisfying than it would be for a normal person. For most people pursuing careers in these areas, the erroneous belief that they are one of these rarefied individuals results in them neglecting to develop productive life skills which would serve them well in the event that they turn out to be a normal person with normal (i.e. unremarkable) levels of skill in one of the aforementioned domains. But because our culture glorifies working in the sports, fashion and entertainment industries, and scorns working in a normal job like a normal person (bullshit jobs,⁴ soul-crushing desk job etc.), lots of people keep pursuing their dream job long past the point at which it’s abundantly obvious that they’re not talented enough to make a living as a rapper or streamer. As documented in The Disaster Artist, there are few things more heartbreaking than a talentless wannabe actor still pursuing a career as a leading man well into his forties – and unlike Tommy Wiseau, most such people don’t have millions of dollars from real estate investments tucked away. This one is particularly interesting in that, unlike the previous examples, it has the appearance of a zero-sum game, and as such one would naively expect that successful actors, musicians etc. would be incentivised to discourage others from pursuing careers in their domain, or engage in rent-seeking behaviour like guilds and so on. But there may be an alternative dynamic at play, in which moderately talented actors etc. are savvy enough to know that flooding the market with talentless hacks will make the legitimately talented stand out all the more. For years I’ve been convinced that this may be a contributing factor to the recent “body positivity” trend, which I may write a separate post about.
- OnlyFans: Sort of, but not exactly, a sub-point to the above – I doubt there are many women for whom making a living from amateur pornography is their first career preference, or who would say they love making a living from pornography – but certainly there are lots of women who’ve been sold a bill of goods about how making a living from amateur pornography is much easier and more lucrative than doing so via a more conventional vocation, and being able to say that you're attractive enough to make a living from your looks is certainly a bigger flex than making a living from working in accounts receivable. In the case of women who forgo developing real professional skills in favour of setting up an OnlyFans account under their own names, the outcomes can be particularly disastrous. Not only do they quickly realise it’s a much more labour-intensive job than they were led to believe; not only are they quickly subjected to the rude awakening that they’re nowhere near as attractive as they thought they were (and therefore that all of their friends telling them that they were 10/10 bad bitches were just yasslighting them); not only are they quickly made aware of the diminishing returns inherent in the fact that a woman’s attractiveness is heavily determined by her youthfulness; not only do they quickly learn that the more attractive women have the vanilla corner of the market stitched up, and hence that the only way to stay competitive is by appealing to the fantasies of the gross fetishistic perverts – but on top of all that, images of their rectum paired with their name are now splashed out across the entire Internet effectively forever, potentially curtailing both their professional and romantic opportunities for years to come. (To note: I’m not disputing that this latter point may also be true of women who succeed in making a living in pornography. Just because there are some women who make bank by so doing, doesn’t mean that it’s globally a good decision even for them. My point is only that there’s no way someone like Lily Phillips could hope to have made nearly as much money from a more conventional job as she did from her pornography career, and hence that, from the narrow perspective of remuneration alone, the alternative lifestyle choice was better than the conventional one for her.) But because almost everyone thinks of himself as above-average in attractiveness, women continue trying to make OnlyFans work for them long past the point that they ought to understand that they are rather mid in appearance, and hence earning somewhere near the middle of the OnlyFans monthly income distribution, hundreds of dollars below even the lowest US minimum wage.

Any other examples come to mind? The more I write about this, the more trite and obvious it sounds, making me wonder if I’ve put a foot wrong somewhere.

One point that occurred to me immediately after posting this: this framework is distinct from the luxury beliefs concept insofar as not everyone who stands to benefit from the alternative lifestyle practice is an elite, and not everyone who stands to suffer from it is a non-elite. There are many women from working-class backgrounds who could stand to make a great deal of money from pornography, and many women from wealthy backgrounds whose reputations would take a hit were they to do the same. There are many people from working-class backgrounds who might benefit from therapy, and many people from wealthy backgrounds for whom therapy would only serve to make them more neurotic than ever before.

¹ Not intended as a criticism or insult: per the expansive definition I’m using here, it includes people who are unusually intelligent, talented, physically attractive, fiscally responsible etc. but also people who are diagnosably and severely mentally ill.
² I must here mention a favourite anecdote from Holly Math Nerd, who learned the term “demisexual” in a university lecture and explained it to her therapist:

Me: “Today I learned that I am deeply and profoundly oppressed by my status as a sexual minority.”

Therapist: (raises an eyebrow).

Me: “I in fact fit under the LGBTQ+ umbrella. A is one of those extra letters, and I am in fact a type of Asexual.”

Therapist, laughing: “What?!”

Me: “I am, I’ll have you know, an oppressed demisexual.”

Therapist: “What does that mean?”

Me: “A demisexual is someone who only experiences sexual attraction when they have formed a close emotional bond.”

Therapist: (nods, several times, thinks for about thirty seconds.) “When I was a boy, we had a different word for people like that. We called them, ‘women’.”

³ No doubt there are many who come to believe that they are mentally ill in part because they are seduced by the idea that it relinquishes them of being held responsible for their bad behaviour, along with providing them with a convenient excuse for why their lives didn't turn out the way they hoped. Regrettably, I speak here from experience, certainly on the latter point if not the former.
⁴ Based on a study which, like everything else in the ideologically motivated social sciences, failed to replicate. One can only assume the notoriously scummy and dishonest David Graeber was putting his thumb on the scale somewhere.

Context

naraburns nihil supernum FtttG 11hr ago · Edited 11hr ago

Great post!

I don't have any problem with the idea of "luxury beliefs" in the sense that some beliefs appear to indeed be things that it is costly to believe, and that some people are able to bear the cost while others are not. I think that what makes them tricky is that the costs themselves are arguably grounded in what other people believe. Where "luxury beliefs" get controversial seems to be when it is a matter of controversy as to whether the costs are themselves a consequence of the belief, or a consequence of e.g. social norms.

Post-WWII, American culture underwent a radical shift. Progressivism to that point had mostly been about the perfectibility of mankind through social programs--public education, proper nutrition, clean water, etc. were things that many American communities still lacked circa 1920. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the percent of illiterate white Americans over the age of 14 dropped (PDF) from 20% to 1%; the percent of illiterate nonwhites dropped from 80% to around 4%--and those percentages went to about 0.5% and 2% in the ten years following. Similar strides were made in nutrition, hygiene, clean water, etc. and we were exporting these advances, too--engaging in ~~imperialism~~ modernization efforts around the world.

But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked. Of course new children are still being born (for now...) so there's always more work to be done, but the extent of visible progress achieved by the progressive project within living memory circa 1995 was unprecedented and jaw-dropping. We'd conquered nature so thoroughly that the only thing remaining to hinder our own progress was... other people!

Prototypical progressive thinkers--I'm thinking specifically of John Stuart Mill, here--were very interested in the idea that we should all have maximum liberty, constrained only by the compatibility of that liberty with everyone else enjoying liberty in similar quantities. "My right to swing my fist ends where your right to swing your fist begins," I suppose, though there is probably a more pithy version of that floating around somewhere. At the root of this is the idea that we are all the best judges of our own flourishing, provided we start from a place of adequate education.

So here in the 21st century, we have responses to your identified categories.

Gender transition is a way for people to flourish by breaking the bonds of restrictive social constructs. The only costs are those imposed by transphobes.
Sex positivity is a way for people to be honest and open about what actually brings them pleasure. The only costs are those imposed by slut-shaming.
Drugs are a way for people to pursue their interest in feeling certain ways. This is more complicated and may not apply to certain highly lethal drugs, but the costs imposed on e.g. marijuana or nootropic users are predominantly imposed by moralizing busybodies.
Psychotherapy is a way for people to flourish with the help of trained professionals. The only costs are those imposed by... psychophobes? Do we have a neat slur for people who think therapy is for the stupid and the weak?
"Do what you love" may be the single most obvious good that any human could choose. If you read Freddie deBoer's manifesto, his whole "imagine a world where..." is a story about people being free to just do what they want, when they want to, without any consequences being imposed on them by society--indeed, with all possible consequences being absorbed, costlessly and without a single judgmental comment, by society.

I think that some of the rising conservatism I see in today's young people--which of course the Cathedral has already tarred as right wing extremism--is a growing suspicion that these claims about the source of oppression being socially constructed, which it may have been understandable for people to believe as recently as 50 years ago, no longer plausibly hold water.

Gender is more than just a social construct, and a true sex change operation would involved extensive (impossible at current tech levels) brain surgery, to say nothing of the endocrine system. Sorry, you're going to have to wait for better tech.
Sexual feelings are more than just a social construct; pair bonding has biological roots and slut shaming is a defense mechanism against defections from the stable equilibrium of general monogamy.
Psychotherapy might be beneficial for the truly damaged, but most likely you're depressed (or whatever) as a result of trying to believe things your biology tells you that you shouldn't believe. Psychotherapy is a way to maintain in humans the view that their inability to thrive in the new progressive world is their problem, not the progressive world's problem.
If we all really did what we love all the time, we would all starve to death in short order. Or if we really did manage to make robots do everything for us, our antifragility would lead to widespread psychological breakdown due to a universal crisis of meaning. Humans are evolved to do the work of humans, not to perpetually enjoy only the enjoyment of humans. Loss of the latter means the extinction of the former.

I'm intrigued by the fact that these are all actually fairly empirical disputes--they're just not the kinds of questions it is easy to get clear answers on. Sociology is tricky even when you don't have political activists thumbing the scales, and these days the scales are so covered with thumbs as to render the payloads utterly invisible.

This all applies, I think, to polyamory as well. I can imagine a society in which humans were more like bonobos--where we had sexual interactions as part of all of our social interactions. The first step, I suspect, would have to be the eradication of sexually transmitted disease! But psychologically this would require a transformation that seems to run deeper than culture. Sexual jealousy is universally attested. There are apparently people who can make polyamory work, and for whom it arguably works very well (though a question arises--if you have to make it work...). But for those for whom it doesn't work, I don't think the problem is poly-shaming or other cultural roadblocks. The problems seem more biologically grounded than that. My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs.

(In particular--the sneer faction of the ratsphere has always been comparative conservatives about polyamory, and yet they are if anything more progressive than the modal rationalist when it comes to, say, transsexuality. I notice that I am confused.)

ABigGuy4U naraburns 4hr ago

But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked.

One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution and the uncorking of more and more energetically concentrated fossil fuels. When the quality of the gas stopped getting better and better all the supposedly related social improvements suspiciously stopped.

naraburns nihil supernum ABigGuy4U 3hr ago

One could argue that both the Enlightenment and the later Progressive moment falsely took credit for quality of living improvements that were actually just the result of the Industrial Revolution

I mean, this is pretty much Marx's whole schtick, isn't it?

My own view is that ideas and material reality are mutually intertwined, but I doubt "it's both, really" is a position that will raise anyone's eyebrows. The hard part is explaining exactly how each influences the other, and I've never encountered a fully satisfactory approach to that question. Clearly, sometimes people think new thoughts and do new things. Clearly, sometimes their success in doing so depends on the conditions of material reality. And equally clearly, sometimes the conditions of material reality are the result of people thinking new thoughts and doing new things.

But mostly, Nothing Ever Happens, which makes the fact that anything has ever Happened at all, all the more puzzling. This is at heart the same argument Parmenides ("change is an illusion") had with Heraclitus ("sameness is an illusion"), which Plato "resolved" by saying--of course--"it's both, really."

4bpp After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political naraburns 7hr ago

Isn't the "sneer faction" simply the faction of devout progressives, which has the moral foundation that the impulses and desires of men as traditionally conceived are bad? Polyamory is a way for men to have multiple women sexual partners simultaneously, which is understood to satisfy the masculine impulse - especially since the most salient cases of rationalist polyamory look like hypermasculine alpha nerds having a harem of impressionable and psychologically troubled groupies - and therefore bad. (I would be mildly surprised if the sneerclubbers took any issue with more progressive-coded free love communes, which are hardly different from poly group houses.) Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man, and makes others uncomfortable, and is therefore good.

You could counter that the moral foundation I impute to progressives above is uncharitable and most of them would dispute having it, but neither progressives nor their opponents respect the structural implications of their stated beliefs in other cases (Transsexualism vs. transracialism? Respect for merit, authority and tradition when those are on the side of the outgroup?) either. Taking anyone at their word is only a recipe to be confused more.

HereAndGone 4bpp 1m ago

hypermasculine alpha nerds

Asking for a friend, can you steer me towards any pictures of these hot chad nerds? Because the photos* of real life guys in that scene I've seen, I'm sure they have lovely personalities 😁

*Such as the ones attached to dating docs, quite a few of which have made me draw in my breath and go "Oh dear, why did you pick this photo?"

FtttG 4bpp 6hr ago

Transsexuality (MtF, because hardly anyone actually cares about the other direction) directly emasculates one man

Vaginoplasties are only undertaken by a tiny minority of MtF people. The vast majority of MtF people have fully intact penises.

4bpp After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political FtttG 6hr ago

I meant it in the figurative sense (a man turned transwoman does not present as traditionally masculine anymore), not in the sense of actual amputation.

FtttG 4bpp 5hr ago

The trans women you've met must pass a hell of a lot better than the ones I've met, or seen photos of.

4bpp After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political FtttG 5hr ago

I suspect you may be letting your feelings about transwomen ("gross, obviously masculine"?) cloud your understanding of the word. If you search for combinations like "work emasculating", you will see an abundance of discussions where people consider as "emasculating" things that include being called "cute" by older female coworkers, doing any desk work at all, being involved in childcare and having your wife earn more than you. I have also seen discussions of children's propensity to insult less assertive peers as "gay" as emasculation. Surely putting on a dress and trying to speak in a high-pitched voice on a regular basis is more of whatever is common to all those scenarios; and if your understanding is that being considered cool and imposing by women, doing physical labor, leaving housekeeping tasks to women and being a dominant provider who is definitively not at all gay is bad, then being far removed from those ought to be a good thing.

FtttG 4bpp 4hr ago

Well actually my point is that there are plenty of self-identified trans women who don't even put on a dress or try to speak in a more high-pitched voice.

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