site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

On a pothead and notions of personal freedom.

What's TheMotte's opinion on the legitimacy of protecting individuals from inadvertent value drift? Or in other words: is it okay to let people degenerate, so long as every step is taken out of their own will? Is it liberating to just not let them? It seems to me like answers explain one of the core differences in conservative versus liberal schools of thought. This is rather low-effort, apologies.

I'm asking for a friend, so to speak. A few months after my (in retrospect, overly frantic) escape from Russia, most of my friends have deigned to abandon skepticism and reading «respectable sources» and followed suit. We've stopped in different places. The other day, I've talked to a guy who's happily stuck in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I've known him for 10 years, talking less and less as time went by. He used to develop sensitive software for state corps; unassuming, vulgarly hedonistic, from a simple family, but reasonably smart and curious and kind. Too open-minded, perhaps, and... neurodivergent enough to have atypical reactions to chemicals – took a full milligram of LSD to get him to trip balls once. It seemed like he was tripping half the time – that is, when not playing PC and console games, working, cooking, learning work-related stuff, playing guitar, hitting on girls, hanging out with friends, building random contraptions as a hobby, listening to my bullshit or to music. More or less a normal modern manchild... That said, he had always struck me as distinctly American in spirit. Maybe it's about his BMI being like 38 and my prejudices – but, charitably, it's because he was too cheerful, and conspicuously non-suicidal considering his lot in life. Well, helped him get girls at least.

I digress. So, he's in Bishkek, I've written to him before the New Year. And the only thing he's interested in talking about is weed. Hash. Wax. Blunts. All the nomenclature. How hard it hits and how easy it is to get and how tolerant the local cops are of potheads. He's not even able to perfunctorily ask me about my situation or maintain a coherent dialogue. He doesn't notice the war any more. Hey dude, just come here, dis shit rules! They say in the summer it'll blow your mind! Do you even smoke? Ah, only DMT? Wha, you don't? You gotta try what they got here! Huh, talk about anything else you say? Uh... food's awesome too...

The tragedy is, this guy still works as a software engineer. But that's all he is now. He's a fat engineer who smokes pot and consumes food, and he can only talk about pot, food and a bit of engineering. His whole personality has been reduced to those three efficiently saturated domains: earning resources to convert into cheap utilons while modifying the state of consciousness to get more utilons and care as little as possible about anything else. It's a distilled, barebones functional version of his original, simplistic but not unloveable character. All the nuance that made him less than perfectly reducible to a one-track NPC just got pruned away.

Frankly, it's an almost demonic regression, the killing of soul, I guess in the same manner that the stipulated bug-peddling WEF NWO lords would like us all to undergo. I've known quite a few casual users and outright drug addicts, mostly stim types, but I haven't seen anything else destroy a human so thoroughly yet surreptitiously, with so little smoke to set off fire alarms (ahem). And yet, growing up, I've been inundated with messaging about «legalize» (легалайз), the noble fight of Rastafarians, the insanity of the war on drugs, with weed the Redeemer of all substances, the least harmful, Sacred Victim of brutish abuse. Now that I think back to it, a few of my pot-and-psychedelics openminded acquaintances display milder versions of this shift. How the hell did libs arrive at the idea that pot is harmless?

But it is. It doesn't cause significant bodily harm, and it doesn't compel, doesn't build anything like the crude physiological dependency loop of opiates. It only makes one a bit different, for a few hours. Alters emotion, cognition, perception, information consumption patterns, sense of reward from stimuli. Imposes a predictable vector of value drift. Allows exercising freedom in self-determination, really. Didn't Leary say it's a sacred right? Can a transhumanist take issue with that?

Like with freedom of speech that, according to many progressive arguers, is the matter of state censorship covered by First Amendment and not an ethical principle concerning the propagation of truths, one can think about the right to self-determination in legalese. Free choices are uncompelled choices; what else can there be!

I dare think my curious and open-minded friend 10 years ago would've been terrified of his current form, and perhaps would have asked for help to steer him off that path. He was failed by the society and the community, in that he was not provided a robust framework to anticipate this outcome, take it seriously, and build a behavioral scaffolding to compensate for his leanings. All he knew of religion is that it's a cringe grandma thing; all he wanted from tradition was insight porn for trips; all he asked from people around was good vibes and tolerance. He, like me, like all of us, was neatly cut off from ages past.

Of course, a keen reader has already noticed that the progressive view does recognize this problem, albeit for a different failure mode. Progs fret about right-wing extremists, and propose deradicalization. While their opponents believe that the natural tendency is for men to degenerate just as rocks roll downhill, progs worry that, if left to their own devices, men will drift towards fascism, the ur-illiberal doctrine, and so should be provided with a framework for steering back to mainstream (or, hopefully, being nudged into their camp). People's media feeds, their habits and states of mind, and perhaps even the popularity of substances modulating those, should be subtly influenced to that end. It is not coercion: it's just, say, providing an opportunity. Both camps claim to stand for the freedom of individual («in his or her pursuit of happiness», some add), and have philosophical treatises defending their notions of individuality and freedom – more religiously inspired and deontological on the right, more bluntly biodeterministic and utilitarian on the left.

I don't think it's neatly symmetric, though. In the end, conservatives act and talk as if a big part of the individual's genuine essence is embedded in the collective – or more to the point, family, lineage, community, parish, tribe, up to the entire nation, religion, the people or civilization. This essence is fragile, nurtured by the work of many generations and, effectively, seeks to be instantiated in a body, and has that right; so it can demand having an incomplete, raw individual be molded to accept it – in ways sanctioned by the tradition, by hook or by crook, with honest persuasion, sly conditioning or plain coercion. It is not denied (except by ways of complex theological argument, I guess) that this is a reduction in liberty, but it is equally not claimed that liberty of a raw individual is the point. «Spare the rod and spoil the child». The point is that children grow up all right.

Liberals disdain the notion of supra-individual spirits or essences, either as nonsense or as apologia of parasitism and mutilation; humans are whole by birthright, and their freely made choices are theirs, no ifs and buts; sans coercion, deception and a few edge cases perhaps, they cannot be meaningfully moved off their organic path, and should be allowed to figure it out in mutual respect.

And Progressives come part of the way back to the starting point: they propose guardian spirits of sort, ones that should be implemented by organizations and protect unwitting plebs from contagious evil ideas, accidentally powerful yet worthless memes; or perhaps, alter plebs to make them immune. But those spirits are said to exist only to make real liberalism possible.

Progressives have their wisdom – as any reactionary who's noticed he's reinventing bits of Derrida or Foucault may attest. My personal belief, in these terms, is admittedly close to the progressive one (rejoice, Hlynka) – with a humble twist informed by my notion of Death. I think supra-individual mental structures are only deserving of power inasmuch as they increase human freedom, with freedom imprecisely defined as the capacity to make diverse and spontaneous choices. Humans can be goaded, conditioned and coerced today if that allows them to be freer tomorrow, help them not mode-collapse into degenerate flanderized versions of themselves, not die a little. In this sense, the ethos of «legalize» was illegitimate, and the prudish ethos of contempt for deadbeat junkies is valid and, ultimately, liberating.

It's an egoistic point of view, of course. Were the latter more powerful, maybe I'd still have had one more friend.

What's yours?

As you noted, a marijuana addiction is far less insidious than many other choices. A town of potheads faces far less severe problems than a town of heroin addicts. Your friend has a job, and while he may only use that job as a means of acquiring more weed and food, he is still a productive member of society - and his weight will cause pressing issues for both himself and society far sooner than the weed will.

Sure, The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come could have probably swayed your friend 10 years ago with visions of his present self, but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.

I think liberals underrate the importance of the collective, but I really can't get over my innate libertarian streak here. I would wager that your friend has about as much capacity for free will with regards to weed intake as any other addict does (very little). But does it really warrant more heavy-handed intervention? Weed is a plant and mild narcotic, a weed addict is positively harmless in the grand scheme of things. For me, any government or societal measure against something has to overcome my inherent aversion to such a thing. Who the fuck are you, Mr. Legislator/Pressure Group, to tell me what I can and can't do? I didn't vote for you, it is not my neighbor's business what I'm doing in my home if it doesn't harm them, so on and so forth, you get the picture.

So heroin? Sure. My neighbor being a heroin addict is probably going to concern me at some point. As with any drug that hijacks its users minds and causes them to steal and harm to feed their habit. Weed's not that kind of drug though, so I really can't bring myself to support action against it, even if it can hollow someone out. And this is from someone who had a close friend go down that very same path your friend did.

With all that said, I think there's an important facet to this particular topic that's missing. Your friend is doing wax and dabs and talks about potency. The hits your friend regularly takes would probably knock a hippie from the 70s on their ass. Still (probably) ultimately harmless, but I think the common ideas and thought processes about weed and its use hasn't really caught up with the sheer strength of the stuff today.

but he's ultimately not really hurting anyone other than himself right now. And "hurting himself" in a kind of nebulous, philosophical way.

What's nebulous and philosophical about it? I could call it common sensical and immediately intuitive: you're becoming absorbed in cheap pleasures at the cost of living up to your potential.

What's nebulous and philosophical about it?

It comes down to your own personal value judgements. I agree with your position, but there are others who think this kind of life is perfectly fine and legitimate. I've met a handful of people who would see no problem at all with this lifestyle.

It comes down to your own personal value judgements.

I can think of more down to earth reasons. Bad habits aren't entirely self-regarding acts. If you're not a hermit than you're going to find yourself in positions where people you care for are in need of your help, and you can either succeed or fail at that. Sometimes failure is out of your control, but as often it's something straightforward where you can track the failure to a particular bad habit or the absence of a good one. There's a reason why communitarian ethics place such an emphasis on things like this.

I agree with your position, but there are others who think this kind of life is perfectly fine and legitimate. I've met a handful of people who would see no problem at all with this lifestyle.

I've met some people who have thought about it long and hard and have decided to take it easy, but I think it's rare that people are being honest with themselves, and the excuse making is often a more harmful habit than the behaviour. I've found it to be a useful mental trick to frame it in terms of affirming the trade-off and say something like "I love gaming so much I'm going to stay up all night doing it instead of studying tomorrow, and I'll do the same the day after too". I either end up finding my actions ridiculous (which gives inherent motivation to stop doing them) or I find that I'm happy with the trade-off.

Right. One could consider it a fuck you to Marie Kondo striver culture, a "laying flat" as the Chinese under-zeitgeist has it.

Of course. But the same can be said about many things. In fact very few people live up to their potential. Do we need to enforce “living up to your potential?”