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Consider this a general reply to the quoted comment as well as to https://www.themotte.org/post/2277/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/352758?context=8#context .
Look, I'm not trying to convince you to not "pick the woke", or that I or anyone on my side as it were should "have power". I don't meant to tell you what to support or oppose. I'm not trying to convince you of anything, really. I don't think you made a mistake in your thinking, or that you should support a different side. I think you need to acknowledge that there's a good deal of conflict theory playing out. And I think arguing that the goings-on are good or bad in the framework of mistake theory misses the more tangible points of why and how this happened and why and how it will happen again.
Co-opting institutions in the name of ideology taints them.
If I turn the military into a bastion of reactionary thought, then I shouldn't be surprised that a century of leftist agitation works to erode the military even if that means that modern European nations have to piss their pants when Putin knocks over some border towns in Ukraine (though, granted, much of that panic be performative), or that we flail helplessly as pauper pirates in the Red Sea take our shipping hostage. We're materially worse off for it, and now untold billions of Euros will be wasted on incompetent rearmament programs to pretend to remedy the problem, but what good is any complaining? Socialists and communists and their green and woke successor ideologists have dismantled the military not because it wouldn't have been useful to them, but because the military was inseparably linked to reactionary ideologies.
The church - really any Christian church, all of them, doesn't matter which - has undergone the same process, though over a longer period of time. I'll skip the blow-by-blow, let's just say that in between the middle ages where the church wasn't just a major power-broker but also an absolutely essential insitution in almost matters social and cultural, at all levels of society, in all stages of life, it now mostly isn't. And it's left a giant God-and-Church-and-Community-shaped hole in western people's lives. Why did we do that to ourselves? Why didn't we take it slow and wait for a superior alternative to be developed? Why didn't we just root out the pedophiles and the nazi sympathizers and the intolerable profiteers like the prelate of Limburg and then go back to our congregations? Because again, it wasn't about troubleshooting or optimizing a socially useful institution, but about destroying an ideological enemy. Whether you were an enlightenment firebrand, a libertine who didn't want his hedonism criticized, a revolutionary who wanted to design his own institutions, a socialist who saw it as a tool of the burgeosie, or a late 20th century progressive who really needed to show off how much better he was than the primitives of yesteryear - they all had their various tactical reasons for destryoing the standing of religion in society, even without providing a better alternative. And they were right to, because the church wasn't just there to provide spiritual care and moral support, it absolutely was in their way and unwilling to give up what authority it had over peole's lives.
Or think about the immense economic damage caused by various green ideological warfare. For every sensible ban on a poisonous but replaceable substance, and for every much-appreciated restriction on the pollution of the commons, there's at least one other ideologically motivated but completely superfluous and highly harmful obstruction to economic activities. Pouring massive public funding into electric cars, for example. But it will save the climate, you might say. Then how about scrapping Germany's safe and productive nuclear power plants on what was little more than a whim?
And let's not even get started with "The Pandemic" or "The Refugees".
And by all means, maybe I'm just not aware of the full scope of the goings-on in America right now, but I doubt that what President Trump is doing to public university funding is anywhere near on that level.
In any event, my point is just this: I encourage you to consider these events in terms of conflict theory, because conflict is what is happening. Neither side is trying to do what's best for society; both are vying for influence, standing, authority and power, and whatever socially useful institution gets ground up on the way is just collateral damage. And neither side can, at present, afford to play nice. I leave it open to you whether you want to see the two sides as a left-vs-right, woke-vs-antiwoke or trump-vs-antitrump. But it's a conflict. In game-theory/prisoner-dilemma terms, both sides are in the business of defecting, and whichever side opts to cooperate instead loses. It would be terribly nice if both sides cooperated, but that's not what's happening, and asking only one side to cooperate while the other defects amounts to asking them to lose gracefully.
Destroying the commons for ideological gain is not new or unique to one side in the culture wars, and both will do it when it ends up being strategically feasible.
@FCfromSSC used to have a pithy phrase about this. Something about maximizing inconvenience for the outgroup?
Thanks!
Hm. It may not be as applicable to my topic as I thought. "Without getting in too much trouble" doesn't seem very accurate at the current stage.
Edit: No, I'm wrong. It remains accurate. It's not like POTUS Trump is getting into any trouble he wouldn't have been in anyways.
I'd say it's entirely applicable. "without getting in too much trouble" is one of the two main throttling mechanisms on the tribal hatred engine, and is tightly linked to the other one, the fact that the search is "distributed". The search being distributed reduces how much trouble individuals get in, and reduces the efficiency of the search because it's conducted in a less-conscious fashion. It's the part people miss when they niavely predict the outbreak of civil war over the atrocity du jour.
Here's a gradient:
"X are bad" > "X shouldn't be tolerated" > "It's pretty cool when an X gets set on fire" > "you should set an X on fire" > "I'm going to set an X on fire" > actually going out and setting an X on fire.
You can graph the gradient in terms of actual harm inflicted on the outgroup, by the danger of getting in trouble, or by the amount of trouble you'll get in. There's a sweet spot on the graph where you find the greatest harm inflicted for the least cost incurred. The Culture War consists of people, with various degrees of consciousness, searching both for that sweet spot and for changes to social conditions that make the sweet spot larger and sweeter. Increasing consciousness of the nature of the search increases search efficiency greatly. Being unaware of the mechanics of getting in trouble likewise increases the efficiency of the search, since even if you get in trouble, you still provide valuable data to the rest of the search nodes. Various coordinated actions, changes in social norms or in formal policies likewise increase the efficiency of the search by asymmetrically reducing the threat of trouble being gotten into. Affirmative consent policies, DOGE, "who will kill Elon" and "are those level-4 plates?" are all variations on a theme.
Blue hostility toward the Church and Red hostility toward Academia are the same thing: coordinated meanness against an enemy tribal stronghold, moderated by the need to not individually get in too much trouble. The tribes successfully purge each other from their institutions, and then are shocked when the other side no longer values the institutions they've been purged from and begins reducing them with metaphorical bombardment.
...And for those who've read this far, this is your reminder that this process is not your friend. Our capacity to maintain flowing electricity and running water rely on the sweet spot staying quite small and the search being quite limited and stable over time.
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