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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   27408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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"Egalitarian" societies have really not been around long in the grand scheme of things and the wheels are already clearly coming off with cratering TFR and solutions like mass migration causing massive destabilization.

I came to this same conclusion and it was a real doompill for me. The kind of modern secular liberal egalitarian democratic system we've been running for the last fifty or sixty years just isn't standing up to the test of time very well. That system has reacted by tabooing any values other than its own, but that hasn't actually fixed anything, and so now we have a decrepit empire rife with heresy.

Everywhere Urban and modern has extremely low fertility not just modern liberal societies.

I came to this same conclusion and it was a real doompill for me.

Really? I felt a tremendous amount of relief. To me it seemed like everything was just getting worse and worse with no end in sight and I had no idea why. When I realized that, oh, we're just insane when it comes to women and race and fixing that will fix pretty much everything else, it was like the horizon began to lighten in the East.

To doompill about this would require me to think that egalitarianism had triumphed in ridding the world of people who can perceive the truth. But it hasn't! Racism and sexism are both alive and well, thank God, and will soon be coming to the rescue of benighted Western Civilization.

The problem in the meantime is that so many positions of consequence are held by people who can't or won't notice what's happened.

This new generation is so strangely split. Young men radical reactionaries; young women radical... uh, I don't even know what to call them. Hateful, shrewish, self-defacing cat-ladies? No idea how this is going to play out politically but it's going to be fascinating, and in the long run I think women will ultimately buckle and follow the lead of men back to a social model which actually works.

When I realized that, oh, we're just insane when it comes to women and race and fixing that will fix pretty much everything else, it was like the horizon began to lighten in the East.

Heuristic: if you find yourself thinking "once we fix [my pet issue], most other problems will solve themselves", that means your mind has been hijacked by a hostile ideology. This is true regardless of the contents of [my pet issue]. This failure mode is more common on the left than the right - usual contents are "capitalism" or "consumerism" or "patriarchy" - but it happens on the right too ("immigration", "atheism", "homosexuality", "political correctness") and even to believers in weird fringe stuff ("prediction markets").

Solid point and I accept it, though in this case my reasoning is more that "Once those problems are solved we'll be back in a position to deal with the others." It's a sort of faith in my heritage.

I could expound on my own subjective view at length, but I think it would be more useful to just say that at some point my vision of the far future went from Star Trek to, I don't know, Dune or something, and I didn't like it.

Funny. I was just wondering why entire subgenres of SciFi and althistory don't work for me anymore as I get more conservative/blackpilled.

"Written with the assumptions of Star Trek in mind" captures the commonalities even across genres surprisingly well.

There's a goldilocks zone between "obnoxiously poisoned by leftism" and "Randian libertarian blowhard" in SciFi.

...I haven't exactly found it yet, but it has to be there.

Heinlein's cocktail of beliefs is at least bizarre enough to be more entertaining than irritating.

Jerry Pournelle has at least an interesting ideology that shows through his writing.

Honestly never heard of him. But he has short stories which are enticing as a sample. Really I'd like more good apostolic Christian sci fi.

If you find Heinlein entertaining, you might look at Pournelle & Niven's "The Mote In God's Eye"; Heinlein helped with the editing and called it "a very important novel, possibly the best contact-with-aliens story ever written". It's had 50 years to be surpassed, but I'd still say it's top-five and I think most people would say top-ten or at least top-20.

It's definitely not explicitly Christian sci-fi - Niven is (or at least at one point was; he doesn't talk about religion much) an atheist, one of the main characters is Muslim, and there's not anything theological about the plot. But it's set in a world of Pournelle's where humanity is under the aegis of a mostly-Catholic empire, and both that and Islam have an impact on the story; it's definitely not just religion of the Star Trek "how cute; they'll grow out of that soon" or "look they made a cult around some aliens" varieties (though there's one of the latter too).

Pournelle is great, but he is at his best when he is collaborating with Larry Niven; try Lucifer's Hammer for a standalone novel that is not part of a larger universe.

I'm in favor of the move, all things considered.

Star Trek is not a human future. It's a fictional scenario constructed to serve as the vehicle for the political assertions of people laboring under any number of ridiculous misapprehensions about human nature. Humans would have to be substantially modified in all sorts of ways to make that work, and I think we'd lose much of what I value about humans in the process.

Dune looks like a human future full of people living human lives. Most of the 'bad' things in the books are straightforwardly contrived for plot purposes. I think Dune would be a good future. Caladan seems nice. And I don't think most of the Landsraad would actually put up with the Harkonnens except for, again, contrived Imperial support.

But, in such cases, the question one ought to ask is what ruler one is even using to measure 'good' and 'bad'. And if it turns out one's answer is 'the social consensus prevalent when I was young' one is due to have a bad time in short order.

What actually matters to you in the future? What patterns are worthy of preservation and propagation?

FWIW, I don't recall getting any view of the common people's lives in Dune. We know of the high drama of the aristocracy, and the supposed macrohistory, and not much else.

OTOH, I never read past God-Emperor.

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