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 -
You (the State in its formulation as society, which is clearly the you being referenced here) don’t do anything. That’s the hardest answer of them all. You just don’t touch it, the good and the bad. Your mother and sister will have kids, and it isn’t the responsibility of the State or any other formulation of the general “you” to do anything about that. You have to stop interfering and be willing to let things play out organically. We see this perhaps most pressingly with immigration questions these days. High modernist planners at the highest levels of government realized that there was going to be natural decrease in the fertility rate after the baby boomers, and that this would create an eventual national crisis, so their solution was to import foreigners, based on their belief that all humans are fundamentally similar enough to be economically interchangeable.
This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.
All of that could have been avoided by the planners packing up their notebooks, going home, and letting natural civilizational cycles of rising and falling fertility play out. Those might have been the original bullshit jobs, as it were, a job that would be better done by not doing it.
But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything that people ask “Should I be left to rot?,” rather than “What have I done so that I won’t rot in my old age?”
The State shouldn’t even be perceived as “leaving you to rot” in your old age. Your choices are the ones that should define your old age. If you don’t have descendants, do you contribute enough to a community that they think it’s worth helping you out? Are you a beloved Grandfatherly figure or are you the local crotchety hermit? Etc etc through all of our choices all through life.
I don’t blame the average person for this kind of thinking, because the State, by shoving itself into everything actually closes down the possibilities for people. Maybe you and a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age. That would be laudable, if someone on the Motte right now were doing that I would have serious respect for them, whatever their reasoning behind not having kids. But the State will come and interfere. Are your houses big enough? Is the road sized appropriately for emergency vehicles? Is your private group a little too racially homogeneous about letting new people in? Etc etc.
And the squashing of that ability to just do things, to organically arrange things, for better or for worse at the lowest level and move up from there, that’s crushing to the soul of a civilization, to a people, to individual persons. I actually think this is a discussion where many lefties might find themselves agreeing with me, in that most complaints about crony capitalism stem from this kind of State over-regulation of everything.
But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute. You, and everyone else, should be freed to make decisions and suffer consequences, the good and the bad.
But in principle, isn't "the State" what organically arises from the latter arrangements scaling up and coming to rely on common record-keeping infrastructure to reduce friction cost for all involved?
It starts with a tribe or a village. Old Greybeard is a font of good advice, so of course, everyone chips in to get him some fruit and cured meat in the winter. And maybe they do the same for Old Bald Bastard who curses out anyone who comes near his hut; no one likes him, but… the current best hunter's pretty cranky too, and he isn't stupid. If he sees that O.B.B.'s left to rot, he'll leave the tribe in the lurch and look for some place where he can expect better rewards for his years of good service once his teeth start to fall out. Wait a few generations. The village gets bigger - now there are a lot of old mouths that a majority of townsfolk wants to see fed for one reason or another, but it would just be inefficient to collect separate donations for each old geezer individually. So a guy takes it upon himself to collect bulk donations from each household, and divide them up equally to all the elders. So far so good.
Except, what if it turns out there's another guy doing the same thing for contributions to the town bridge-building budget, and yet a third guy who collects the money for the town watchmen to buy themselves weapons they use to defend the whole community? Not only is this more work for everyone, but some of the less well-off households keep having to explain that they can't give to the Elders Feeding Fund because they already gave all their spare grain to the Soldiers Feeding Fund. Pretty soon, everyone agrees it's more convenient for those guys to work together and create a single list, and for each household to make one donation a year, that gets divided up between the different useful community functions.
All perfectly sensible, but suddenly you have something that looks an awful lot like taxes and social welfare.
Presumably your libertarian alarm bells start going off at the step in all this where it stops being optional for a given household to give to the "charitable" fund. Now, I would personally say that it's fair enough of the majority to take the trade-off of "a given household can no longer opt out of the yearly donations without leaving the tribe altogether; but in exchange the collection process will be (relatively) hassle-free for everyone". Of course, I can respect the classic ethical objection - "coerced giving is theft, end of story, it doesn't matter if it's more 'efficient'". But it sounded more like you were concerned about the overall inefficiency of government intervention than taking a principled stand against taxation even at the cost of potentially suboptimal outcomes. And if that's your position, then... I don't think it's coherent. Every step I outlined is just a rational iteration upon the previous status quo, making things smoother and more efficient for everyone. The solutions you advocate aren't really an alternative to a social welfare state. They amount to little more than doing social welfare in patchy, inefficient ways while depriving yourself of the centralized record-keeping tool which thousands of years of cultural evolution created for exactly this purpose: the State.
(There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence. Even if you're really doomer-pilled about full-sized, modern governments, however, I think the above argument still illuminates the fact that it's not uniquely strange or sinister for Big Government to try and screw up attempts like the one you describe to create "mutual support networks". Fundamentally, that's just the perfectly healthy reaction of an established State trying to nip de facto secession in the bud; no State, good or bad, can tolerate the creation of a rogue mini-State within itself.)
I’m not even a huge libertarian. I think that theft is a perfectly valid way of acquiring wealth, society to society. That’s what conquest is, after all, and I think conquest is a perfectly valid way for nations to go about dealing with each other. Internally in a society, theft will destroy it, but that’s just ingroup/outgroup dynamics at the vast scale of peoples and nations. Externally, it can improve it dramatically, ergo all the IP theft that China does, and which young America did a fair amount of from the British. The non-aggression principle is incoherent.
This is more like where I am. Technology probably lets us have sleek, attentive and relatively homogeneous polities bigger than Ancient Athens, but the reality is that I know jack shit about New York and so, in a perfect world, my opinion about what they get up to over there should be completely impotent to change anything there. And of course, vice versa. Patchy, inefficient ways are better.
Also, Big Government doesn’t need to be strange or sinister. Plenty of bad decisions are made by the smartest people with the best intentions. They just need to be wrong and do their damndest to prevent any possible alternative from ever arising. All of which can be done out of the purest hearts.
Well, amen to that - but I got the impression from your OP that you were presenting government interference as a kind of aberration, that the State's interference in things like the mooted mutual-support-network-of-elderly-bachelors was inherently overreach and not the proper purpose of the State. In contrast, then, I was arguing that providing this kind of service is exactly the purpose of a state, and squashing internal competition comes hand in hand with that. In this framing, we might say that a given government - say, the 21st century US Gov - has grown so cancerous and counterproductive that it ought, at this point, to be circumvented and replaced from within; but statements like "The State shouldn’t even be perceived as 'leaving you to rot' in your old age" still come across as self-contradictory. If it were functional the State absolutely ought to deal with that sort of thing, in fact that is exactly what it means for it to be "the State"; it just might be the case that it's so bad at it currently that it ought to be prevented from fulfilling this natural purpose.
Also, side-track, but:
Well, now, I wouldn't go that far. It's not optimal for national flourishing, but then, no one ever said morality had to conveniently be isomorphic to the optimal strategies for material success. It may be (whether because God wishes to test His children on virtues orthogonal to profit maximization, or because there is no God) that doing the ethical thing leads to material ruin - that doesn't ipso facto prove it isn't the ethical thing.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'm not sure what to call the fallacy I think you're making, but it seems like you're drawing lines about what is and isn't state intervention in a way that's intended to benefit your point, rather than deriving logically from some coherent first-principles definition. For example--
You complain about immigration as if the default state of the world is "no immigration" and state intervention is required and responsible for migration. But imagine a world where national policy isn't concerned with immigration at all. Yes, that would mean a reduction in government-sponsored pull factors like welfare and resettlement initiatives for immigrants/refugees, but also a complete lack of enforcement of any sort of border controls. What do you think migration looks like, in this world? Personally, I think we'd see fewer refugees, but even more economic migrants, which seem to be the sort that you're complaining about. Why not let these "natural civilizational cycles" play out here?
Similarly you propose, "a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age" as an alternative to government, but... that seems essentially like a government to me.
Giving you maximal charity, I think I agree with the weak form of the point you intend to make, which is (to the best of my understanding) that particular forms of higher-order, nonlocal government preclude and interfere with individual and local control in a negative way. With some caveats, I'd also agree with,
But I think it's worth being precise about what levels and what kinds of government result in these negative outcomes so as to adequately identify why these problems occur and how they can be prevented. There's no point devolving power to local governments if they're going to be just as stupid, and it's worth noting that a wide variety of modernist problems have direct analogues in smaller local communities. Local communities just happen to benefit from survivorship bias and fewer historical records.
We used to have those and they looked like the Migration Era. And to be honest, if the Central Americans can pull off a Migration Era conquest of the rich land to their north, they deserve their winnings.
What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.
That would be better than the current situation, so if they were actually allowed to play out with all the violence accompanying it(and not the weird Libertarian vision of people just freely going wherever while the current residents just bend over and take it), I would be fine with that. If that means all of India and Africa builds a navy and comes over here, conquering and pillaging as they go, well, the West had a good run. But at least they actually had to build their navy, instead of just being escorted straight into our airports.
I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general, a point it seems like you understand in the very next paragraph, so I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.
Of course there is. It’s because you don’t actually know what’s stupid. Or rather, we have no idea what the fifth order consequences of our actions are going to be. Nobody who was working on the internal combustion engine in the 19th century had the foggiest idea that it was going to produce Greta Thunberg. The American post-war consensus was a huge boost to the worldwide economy, but it appears to me that a slow decay of the population’s dynamism and a societal Balkanization might have very negative effects later on.
You might think it’s stupid for people to have a purposely all white community, or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law. You could be right, even. I might think a society that transes kids is stupid. I could be right. But we’re not going to know in the long run if my ideas are stupid, or if yours are, when the State shuts down every community it doesn’t like.
And that of course is the crux of the original discussion here. The State has decided that the allegedly best thing for the original population is to let in more than 76 million immigrants, in the belief that this is what’s best for the population it was empowered by.
Because of that, cities and states are allowed to be sanctuaries for these immigrants, but nowhere is allowed to be an anti-sanctuary, actively stopping immigrants at the edge of town. There’s no way to really know which choice is stupider, if such a concept could ever even really be agreed upon.
This is just an example, of course. One could even argue that the State would be betraying its original clients by stopping massive transfers to old people. That’s certainly looking out for their interests, after all, and they were around before the young, so first come first served. That’s a fair argument. Totally destructive for the society as a whole, of course, but a fair argument.
But we’ll never have the opportunity to actually know if stopping transfers of wealth from the young to the old would make a thousand fetuses bloom, because no one is allowed to try it.
We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Countries like South Korea and Japan have had far less immigration than the US and most of Europe, yet their TFR is even lower. Romania has ~97% native born population with the small number of immigrants mostly labourers from Moldova who speak the same language, and yet, the lowest fertility rate in Europe.
“Other states implemented different centralizing solutions to perceived problems and have experienced a similar crisis of modernity” is no different than what I’m saying.
Also, when coming at what was revealed to the reactionary in a dream, the facts presented must at least be factually correct.
Ukraine has the lowest TFR in Europe at 0.99, and that rate does in fact have a lot to do with immigrants.
Romania has a 1.71 fertility rate, making it #6 in Europe.
As for South Korea and Japan, they have their own problems of organic processes being interfered with. The Japanese people have always had a small and not particularly giving batch of islands to work with. The spiritual human carrying capacity on those islands might be as low 50 million people, maybe as high as 90 million. It is almost certainly not 129 million, where the population peaked. The solution to this is for the government to just not touch it. The Japanese government doesn’t actually have to pay old people. It doesn’t have to bring in waves of immigrants, either elite or lowly. It can just let the Japanese people find their own carrying capacity and then work with what is given it in terms of human capital.
Korea’s situation is even worse, and TBH they may be so far gone as a result of culture and government that they’re going to get rolled by North Korea one day, despite North Korea also having a declining population.. That would be a key marker of what the world’s future is going to look like, it it were to happen this century.
I did pick an outdated or possibly wrong map for that statistic, but the point still stands: immigration like you described does not seem to correlate with TFR.
If you look at the countries with the lowest number of foreign born residents in the EU, i.e. Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, they have TFRs of 1.31, 1.57, 1.71, 1.6, 1.50, they are not doing any better the ones with the highest amount of immigration.
Ukraine's TFR was already very low before the war, you can't blame the recent rapid Russian "immigration" for that.
Are you under the impression that I think what I described applies to Bulgaria? It may or may not. I have no idea and don’t care, because I’m not Bulgarian. I’m sure this will shock you, but the USA is different from Bulgaria. I don’t care about Bulgaria and didn’t mention it.
I’m concerned about White people in America, and our fertility is 1.75, and we keep being given the chance to welcome new immigrants with a 2.19 TFR into what is rapidly becoming not our country anymore.
You can think that that’s a good or a bad thing, but your argument is not arguing about what I’m actually saying.
What I am saying is that, in 1965, the United States government, staring down the barrel of the already massive drop in TFR from the pill, should not have passed the Hart-Cellar Act in an attempt to goose the numbers, because opening the floodgates to immigration made the problem worse for the native population in America.
That’s why your references to “Well, Bulgaria has a low TFR” hold no power here. Because at least that’s the TFR the native Bulgarian population is settling on. You can’t tell me what the TFR of the native German population is, because the national stats are full of Turks and Arabs now. These stats are meaningless and say nothing about the effects of immigration.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
My original intent was the much more personal question. I appreciate that you took the time to answer both.
Sorry to have misinterpreted you, glad that I managed to answer your question anyway.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link