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Notes -
Toward a principles-based approach to societal flourishing
The heterodox backlash to mainstream wokeness is inherently reactionary. Taibbi, Weiss, Peterson, Loury, Yarvin; even to some extent Dreher and Alexander all bemoan the current system and wish we could turn the clock back to ... 2008, or 1965, or 2015, or 1600.
There have been few real attempts to change the situation. Weiss is a small exception: she has helped contribute to the University of Austin, which, while I'm very skeptical of its success, is at least doing something. Desantis has perhaps the most success at a political level, though he is often criticized by many in the heterodox blogosphere.
Yet all these fights against wokeness whether merely verbal or actual do not propose a positive trajectory for our society; they merely reject the negative wokeness trajectory.
I want to help create a non-reactionary yet conservative vision for flourishing society. I want this vision to have the following elements:
Compelling and inspirational. I want people to be energized by the vision.
A call to action. This cannot be a passive "keep everything the same as it is right now" conservatism.
A call to a better self. I want this vision to have individual impacts even if society as a whole does not adopt this vision (yes, I know I'm channeling Peterson here).
I have articulated one such vision here: https://pyotrverkhovensky.substack.com/p/how-to-build-a-flourishing-society. I wrote it to at least provide one such vision of a flourishing society to demonstrate that I am not merely complaining but am willing to put some thought into this. I would love to have others (possibly y'all!) take the baton and make something more compelling and actionable.
Let’s see. I’m going to break down what conservative users may agree on first:
There exists vanity and distraction that captures the time and care of a lot of people in the West, and which has downstream consequences
There is a way to live morally, which involves attending to what is good, thinking rationally, and sacrificing bad habits
There are truths agreed upon by both science and major religions: the importance of close social contact, the importance of a healthy family, lowering unnecessary social stress by participating in communal experiences and rituals, living in alignment with the evolutionary grain (“what God intended”)
While historically, art worked toward a moralizing purpose to promote guideline behaviors for a community in the form of music-dramas (operas, before that “moral plays”, after that television and lyrical albums), art (especially painting and architecture), stories (myths and sermons, then literature, now shitposts on your favorite forum and empowered female authors), today art has been severed from any moralizing purpose. Similarly, communal organizations as a whole have been severed from a moralizing purpose.
Society is in desperate need of moral structures, which are not necessarily religious, but which entail many things found in religion (Freemasonry was excellent at inspiring men and yet lacked much of what is identifiable in modern religion)
The wealthy who waste their money on vanity should be shamed and ostracized so as to incentivize them to spend wisely (fine, maybe this one is just me)…
Mating games control much of human behavior, and have decreased in their ability to promote prosocial and healthy behaviors in men and women, and thus ought to be revised
Men largely devote themselves to either what is evolutionarily satisfying or what is socially reinforced. Thus, society should go back to making what is good both evolutionarily enjoyable and socially reinforced.
The idea of God, as an object that one attends to in mind and body, which represents the highest quality of all of our experiences which are placed as his attributes, who is understood socially and mythically which is most evolutionarily efficient, is vastly underrated. If we are intent on beating a dead god, we need to find a viable alternative lest He resurrect Himself.
Society is in need of something similar to a priest class, whose interest is in finding the truth about everything from health to political policy to morality, but who (significantly) do not have faulty incentives, and actually are incentivized to tell the truth, and don’t just do because its their job but because of a sincere emotionally-felt obligation
If we have a rough draft of “things we ought to come together to secure and then promote”, then all that is left is doing that, then determining the correct way to promote it (everyone uses propaganda today, even YouTubers). The “individual vision” is simply the media created which narrativizes the ethos to the individual level.
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