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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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So I've been spending some time on the radfem pipeline. It's been my opinion for some time that radical feminists, like Marxists, are correct on their analysis of their subjects, with no regard to one might think about their solutions. Take the topic of promiscuity; a trait that was historically seen as far more taboo in women that it was in men. Double standards?

The argument is that the male desire seeks virgin wives and prostitutes. The whores will provide sexual release without reproduction and emotional investment to minimise the demand on men’s resources. On the other hand, virgin wives are meant to provide both sexual and reproductive services but exclusively to him so that his resources and labour are spent on his family and progeny alone. While relations with promiscuous women are intended to be secretive and secondary. Essentially, they play the role of sexual garbage collectors who clear the excesses when no one's watching. This is especially true for fighting men, who are separated from their families for extended periods in foreign places and under hard conditions. They miss female company, they seek comfort, relief from loneliness, sexual desire, and recreation. War-like conditions create a huge demand for such promiscuous women, who either seek financial reward in exchange, or security, or both. And so, when a woman has multiple partners, she is slotted into the whore sub-class automatically. This sub-class doesn't demand respect or commitment, they knows their place and that they're not likely to move up the ladder, and so they're viewed as the lowest value women. And in an age before industrialisation when paternity tests weren't even a twinkle in anyone's eyes, and of constant conflict and strife, such promiscuous women with kids especially would lose out of the support structure. Perhaps these standards did make sense in this period. But what role do such standards play now, in ultra societies like the West, with large populations, high levels of specialisation, divisions of labour, lasting peace and advances in medicine? The breakdown of families comes to mind, which is of course for a myriad reasons, to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain. We still have sufficient demographics and functional infrastructure and institutions to keep civilisation alive, even if we reach SK levels of atomisation.

So here's where I'm less certain; will decadence necessarily mean decline? Or maybe we'll just draw out the inevitable and decline will come very slowly, say over a few centuries? Should we turn to traditional norms to reverse this trend? If so, how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

to a point where families are becoming far too expensive to sustain.

Can you expand on why you think families are too expensive to maintain?

will decadence necessarily mean decline?

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents, hardcore in the sense that they resisted the current corrosive liberalism by virtue of their personality traits, cultural or religious tradition, or whatever. There was some triumphalism during the age of New Atheism about how fast many faiths were hemorrhaging members, but I think that those were the easy pickings and eventually a hard core will remain, and the numbers will stabilize and then reverse course. Of course, it's possible by then that the groups will be small enough that they can successfully be painted as "dangerous to democracy" by liberals and destroyed with punitive laws, taxation, lawfare, and targeted propaganda. Who knows.

how can traditional norms become tenable enough to be a potential solution?

I've come to believe that this is impossible, or at least unbelievably difficult. Liberalism, scientism, and humanism have thoroughly penetrated every level of education, entertainment, and "common sense" morality, to the point where it's the water in which every westerner has been swimming for at least several generations. This is a trumph for the secular humanist/liberal projects, but unfortunately it turns out that the axioms in which these projects rest lead to beliefs that are incompatible with societal flourishing (while being great for - a certain definition of - atomized individual flourishing). It's hard enough to remain Christian swimming in this water, nevermind trying to convert the fish who believe they are totally at home in it! It would be like parachuting into North Korea and trying to convince a random North Korean farmer --while you are both still in North Korea -- that the U.S. president is actually a good guy and Americans mean them no harm and that they should unilaterally disarm and then engage in trade with the archenemy. Even if the farmer wanted to, the years of slogans, of propaganda, of emotional speeches by the dear leader would make it extremely painful to change his mind, and even if he did, he would be under constant mental and emotional pressure to "deconvert." So it goes with traditional values today. Absent an authoritarian right wing theocratic coup, I think you're out of luck.

I believe so, and I think it might take a century or two. The future will belong to the people who "show up" genetically which means eventually the vast majority will have hardcore trad parents and or grandparents, hardcore in the sense that they resisted the current corrosive liberalism by virtue of their personality traits, cultural or religious tradition, or whatever.

Do not expect any "religious gene" or "trad gene". If there is any genetic trait that insular religious sects select for in their members, it is going to be WORM type of brain.

"In your childhood, listen carefully to authority figures and never ever in your whole life question what you have learned."

Just like insects on small islands with nowhere to fly tend to lose wings, the new type of human will lose any curiosity or "openness of mind".

I am finding myself increasingly convinced that very few people value such things as "openness of mind" or "freedom" as ends in themselves, anyway. (Some who do tend to be "fools who take things seriously," as I call myself, which would be a type pretty overrepresented here.)

I mean, I, who have at least convinced myself that such things are good, would justify them something like this: freedom (and curiosity and so forth) are important because we can never be perfectly sure that we have things right. We could still be wrong about something terribly important, and so, to avoid trapping ourselves in a Hell of ignorance, we forswear the ability to ever secure ourselves into any supposed Heaven of enlightenment. (After all, reaching such a standard of absolute perfection is infinitely unlikely, so intellectual humility tells me.)

But a lot of people don't share that view of intellectual humility. A lot of people believe that they already do have the way to produce that Heaven on Earth, and if only people would stop disagreeing or disobeying, everything would be perfect. In light of this, "freedom" and "openness of mind" and "intellectual humility" and "democracy" (Erdogan: "Democracy is like a streetcar. When you come to your stop, you get off.") are valued ultimately as pretenses or covers just to keep the current hegemons from cracking down on them long enough to get The Right People with The Right Ideas into power. And after that, it's time to pull the ladder up behind them; slam and lock the door, to ensure that the ways by which the truth came in would never tempt anyone away.

This doesn't even particularly depend on the beliefs themselves: it isn't some flaw unique to the "trad" or to the "woke" or that can't be shared by anyone, really. It's just a question of confidence versus humility: after all, if you really did know for sure the Ultimate Truth, wouldn't all the process of truth-seeking from then on really be just a dangerous temptation from which no good can come, that nobody should be permitted to bother with? Even I would agree, but no matter how sure I am in my beliefs or how important they are to me, I forswear the right to say that I really for sure have the ultimate truth, for if everybody who thought that way before me was wrong - I should be chastened by the fact that the odds are very much against me, so I will give up the right to secure my Heaven so I don't end up creating Hell.

Unfortunately the intellectual commons are just barren nowadays. I think it was a mistake to throw open the doors to allowing everyone to comment on politics/society etc. We should've kept the masses happy with bred and circuses, while a trained aristocratic class a la @2rafa quietly keeps things running in the background.

Ironically it's easier to be liberal when you're in a constrained, elite social group, because you can select for high decouplers.

I'm pretty sure it's the trained aristocratic class that's keeping the intellectual commons barren.