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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I think this is a bit different, because left-wing ideology is, at least in all relevant practice, parasitic: the more radically conservative you are, the higher fertility you have; the more progressive you are, the less you have.
Conservatives can survive just fine without leftists; leftists cannot survive without conservatives.
In contrast, Protestants and Catholics can both survive just fine without either parasitizing off of the other.
Milton Friedman was about as liberal as it got but even in Free to Choose he capitulated and said “this is really a family society and not an individual society.” And there’s where the core of liberalism lost the plot in thinking “groups don’t have rights, only individuals do,” because the fundamental unit of human society isn’t the individual; it’s the family. The US could use a restoration of clan and tribe in society to the benefit of everyone.
Clannish nationalism is an extremely powerful thing. The most extreme variant today you probably find with the Hindus in India which is the only one able to stand up against Islam in its own backyard. Now tell me how that stacks up against liberal capital? Facebook refuses to ban hate speech in India or deplatform nationalist groups like the Bajrang Dal because it fears for the safety of its staff. It’s the only religion on Earth to retain its Indo-European clan lineages unbroken since the Bronze Age and can put multinational corporations in their place.
Narendra Modi currently holds power over the credit lines in India and subordinates financial corporate bodies to himself. That’s the power of the clan. A healthy society looks like blood over the abstraction of liberal principles. It doesn’t derive family duties from justice; it derives justice from family duties. A healthy society looks like collectivism. The rugged individualist lives a shorter and much more anxious life.
Unless you like having your cities burned down you need something like the clan system. Violent activism that happens to me will also happen to my cousin or fellow Catholic. Your enemies are fundamentally mercantile and will fold the moment things begin to get uncomfortable.
In the Punic Wars Rome was a military society going up against a trading merchant society. Rome won and then burned Carthage to the ground because they were willing to spend both more blood and treasure. The Romans lost 70% of their fleet in a single afternoon and then rebuilt the entire thing. Carthage was more concerned with the Iron Age equivalent of its portfolio. Rome won through strength and force of will, and identity.
There’s been other times in our history where we thought we’ve outgrown tribalism. But growth isn’t inevitable and plenty of signs indicate we’re due for a civilizational downgrade. Systems can only get so complex before they become fragile to the point an unforeseen event pushes them over.
This isn't even true, which is even worse. In places like Canada (also just attempted in the UK) people in the right groups get differing sentences because of their alleged group-specific troubles
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Also, note that 'left-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional female' role in society (creates secondary goods, thrive/idealistic mindset, sets morality/cultural aesthetics), where 'right-wing ideology' forms the 'traditional male' role (creates primary goods, survive/realistic mindset, executes on morality/cultural aesthetics).
Remember that
is the state of nature, and what humans have spent the last 200,000 years evolving alongside, and that
has only been true in Western nations for only about the last hundred years. We're still in the evolutionary transition period from the former to the latter, and most left-wing actions are perfectly sane if you view them as "women getting revenge on men for the crime of being utterly dependent on them" (and "the unproductive getting revenge on the productive for being utterly dependent on them" is an excellent explanation for why there are still communists in Western countries).
The problem, and the growing pains now, are that women/leftists perceive (and they are correct) that the Nazis were the last male/rightist attempt at a State. So anything that grants men more power is, in a very literal sense, Naziism to a leftist. [The fact this definition is self-serving, and exists as a conservative force to avoid a more equitable distribution of moral power in society, is by definition irrelevant to leftists.]
No, the dynamics I’m talking about manifest at timescales larger than a generation. Men cannot reproduce without women, nor vice versa, so they are both parts of a single whole. I don’t think one can reasonably call a gender relationship “parasitic” in any biological sense. I’m not using “parasite” as a slur, but referring to a particular dynamic of how life operates.
Now, one can ask “ok but if we just imagine reproduction could be done without the need of one of the sexes, now what?” Basically, either synthetic sperm or synthetic wombs. And yeah, here women don’t come out looking very well. Andrea Dworkin (blackpilled feminist addicted to doomposting before we even had the internet) explicitly posited that right-wing women are terrified of male homosexuality because it represents a potential world without women at all—with reproductive tech, gays could obsolete women entirely and live in a paradise without them. (Yes, this was her actual thesis lol)
I’m not sure I entirely buy her thesis—if nothing else, homosexual desire only exists as a bug in heterosexual desire, so once you’ve severed reproduction and sex with technology, there’s no selection pressure to even be horny in the first place, so I predict it would vanish entirely within a few short generations.
Whether Jesus predicted this in his answer to the Sadducees I leave as an exercise to the reader.
I do. Gynosupremacist thought (erroneously called "feminism" here) is legitimately terrified of straight men doing this to women. "Kill all men"... before men kill all women. This is existential, instinctual, foundational, horrible anxiety.
Some humans are more driven by raw instinct than others.
The dynamics I'm talking about manifest at more immediate timescales. Men are strong enough to do the heavy lifting that is required to secure better sources of food; women are not, thus women die without men. I believe 'helper' was the term used in Genesis.
Interestingly, in places where you can't take two steps without literally tripping over food and game animals, women rule precisely because they have little existential need for men. Their cities consisted of these long houses: the earliest arcologies. This typifies certain civilizations historically native to North America because, prior to 1800 or so, those were the conditions on the continent.
Sure you can. The problem comes when you turn "parasitic" from description to prescription, and it's not acceptable to do this for the same reason it's not acceptable to cheer murder of your political enemies. It's a fundamentally symbiotic relationship where one part needs to not be [seen to be] exploiting the relationship, either in reality or in the eyes of the other.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure this is the fairest way to look at it.
I live in a blue city, and a lot of my friends are progressive and/or part of the LGBT community. And a lot of them were the black sheep in their family even at a young age. Things like a person who became vegetarian almost as soon as she could start thinking about things despite living in a conservative religious household (and who was the token liberal in her mostly conservative public school), or gay/bi people who were really messed up by their strict Mormon upbringing.
I've also heard similar things from people of different generations. A 60-something family friend whose son came out as a transwoman in his 40's, and who was bullied from a young age for being effeminate and found solace in theater in high school. (That last fact was one of the least surprising things I've ever heard - many of my LGBT friends were also part of theater.)
I strongly suspect that being "Bohemian" or a "black sheep" or a certain kind of "weird" is strongly correlated with certain kinds of bullying in middle and high school, and often leads to adopting a more liberal/progressive perspective later in life (probably through some combination of nature - their personalities start off off-putting to some portion of population, and nurture - the experience of being bullied leads them to seek out alternative family-like structures to make up for the ones that failed them in the first place.)
Now, the specific manifestation of this tendency resulting in left-wing politics in modern America is obviously not true at all times and all eras. But I think that calling left-wing politics parasitic might be the wrong framing. I think that the left serves a very similar function to early Christianity, by embracing the cast offs and rejects of the fertile majority, and offering an alternative family structure. For black sheep who become estranged from their family, this becomes deeply important to them.
(I'm mildly reminded of a brief encounter I had with some American Mormon missionaries in Slovakia. They happened to be on the same train I was, and asked to sit near me. And they were accompanied by a Slovakian woman with a disfiguring birth mark on her face. Obviously, one brief encounter is not enough to know for sure, but I wonder if that deformity wasn't somehow causally related to the fact that she became drawn to Mormonism as a Slovakian woman.)
All this aside, early Christianity probably had a higher fertility rate than general Roman society. Christianity embraced low-status individuals(slaves, women, etc) and treated them well(Constantine made slave welfare laws under Christian influence very early, and Christian writers bragged about treating their women better- notably, the pagan majority doesn't contradict them). That doesn't equate to the modern left's tendency to grow wholly memetically rather than through fertility; all the information we have is that Christianity was a high fertility minority whose memetic appeal was at least partly by distributing opportunities to help themselves to the urban poor.
Yeah, I should have probably brought up this disanalogy somehow, since people here have brought up that Christians had a high TFR compared to other Romans before.
However, my main point is that while Leftists grow memetically, it might not quite be correct to call it "parasitically."
Like, putting aside their high TFR, when Christians showed compassion and charity to lepers, Roman tax collectors and ex-prostitutes, they weren't being "parasitic" on all those groups.
And in the modern day, when mentally ill black sheep move away from home, and find the LGBT community or progressivism waiting there to embrace them and all of their messiness, I don't think it is correct to call it "parasitism." Those communities are taking the cast offs that the families with lots of kids didn't want in the end.
Like, I get why some people on The Motte have a natural aesthetic distaste for the way the progressive left seems to embrace weakness, mental illness and ugliness. But you can't cultivate an attitude like that, and then be surprised when a leper colony has formed behind your back, and become part of a larger coalition opposing you.
I have seen so many broken people "bloom" for lack of a better word when they became a part of the LGBT community in my city. They went from struggling people with no friends, and painful family connections to people who could embrace being the weird black sheep that they were, becoming more confident and emotionally stable in the process. How is that parasitic? Especially when the "solution" to that supposed parasitism for the other political tribe is one they will never realistically embrace.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t necessarily disagree with your analysis, but the simple fact is it’s still parasitic in the most fundamental sense.
When you get old and live off pension money, it is younger people who must care for you. If you don’t have children, that means you are being sustained by someone else’s children—whom they invested enormous resources in and sacrificed much of their life (in the hedonistic sense) to rear.
When you let people who do not have children dictate policy, you are going to get policies that favor the parasite over the host. And parasites cannot ever win: they can simply destroy their host and die with them.
Control over policy must be in the hands of the fertile. There simply is no other option—Darwin will, given time, eliminate any group that doesn’t abide by this.
This argument is the radical claim that one cannot store wealth; the old must personally provide people to care for them, merely offering items of value to other people for their care is still "parasitism". Maybe you could build an economic system around this idea, but just shoving it into our current economic system is special pleading.
I think taking an economic view makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. Always look to more fundamental aspects like thermodynamics and biology first, then bend your economic model around that.
With this perspective, what’s really happening is that the supply and demand of labor is changing over time: an aging population is a population where labor is increasing in value, since there are more old people needing care and fewer people available to do the caring.
If your economic system gives too much of a claim on young labor to old demographics, then your society will die. I’m not saying the allocation has to be zero—that there can be no long-term store of wealth—but it clearly has to be less than whatever it takes for the fertile to reproduce at replacement.
Call my model radical if you want, but the fertility data speaks for itself: you will adopt a radical solution, or you will be replaced by those who do.
You were already taking an economic view, calling people who are living off pension money (that they presumably earned) "parasites". Presumably people who are living off employment income are not parasites, and that leads to the direct implication that you cannot store wealth.
Allocation? Are we doing central planning here? The young aren't not reproducing because they are poor, and certainly not because the old people are somehow claiming all their labor.
People are not reproducing because the government promises them the labor of other people’s children in retirement.
I don't think this is true, I think that people are not reproducing because it's work and people don't like that. Retirement savings is a booming business but mostly among people who have kids; places with lower pension amounts are not known for their higher fertility.
More options
Context Copy link
That is unlikely. Social security started in 1935.
FWIW, several of my friends who don't plan on having kids explicitly state that part of the reason is that they will have more money for retirement. From a personal view this is sensible, from a societies' view it's pure insanity, and a point in Soterologian's favor, even if it's far from the only reason people have no kids.
More options
Context Copy link
It takes time for deep incentive changes of this sort to percolate. It wasn’t intended as a subsidy for childlessness, nor was it perceived as such.
But it nonetheless is.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure this is a great argument given out current economic system is a literal conspiracy against storing wealth at basically every level.
You're going to have to spell that out. Usually this sort of claim is about inflation, but inflation doesn't keep you from storing wealth, it just means you can't just keep it in cash. And of course it results in taxes, but governments gonna tax.
Investment, which is heavily incentivized both for reasons of tax and generally because it's considered "good for the economy" is not "storing wealth", it is in fact risking it by having a stake in the system. Which allows and provides for the survival of all of its dependents.
Inflation is just one of the mechanisms deployed to prevent storing "non productive" value, but every modern tax system is designed for this purpose as well.
And this of course was not always the case.
It's not storing wealth in the sense of literally stockpiling useful physical goods, but considering we were also talking about services here, that's impossible in any system; you can't stockpile work that has to be done in the future. Anyway, if investment (presumably including holding debt obligations such as FRNs or treasuries) is "having a stake in the system", Soteriologian's claim that people living off such investments are "parasites" is even weaker.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do I remember wrong or aren’t some of the oldest known writings basically tax records?
I think most of the Ur writings are business records like bills of lading and inventories; I don't know if there were specifically tax records. Though I wouldn't be surprised if some day we find an ancient shop with two sets of records for the same items...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link