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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   3426 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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The priceless work of art being destroyed is a permanent loss for humanity and its culture.

As the loss of the protagonist's loved one is to them. This seems to be the message dissonance. Saying you'd sacrifice a particular human in exchange for preserving a particular work of cultural significance will disgust a significant portion of the population.

The henchmen, in most such stories at least, are pieces of human garbage and the world is made a better place with each one the protagonist kills.

I'd point out that we're almost never given any background on the mooks to know one way or the other. Hence that Austin Powers gag. Its very much something you're just not supposed to think about. The Mona Lisa is a very legible artifact since we know its background and 'importance' so the film can exploit that fact to give you an emotional reaction you WON'T feel for random henchmen #23. But if it was revealed that random henchman #23 is a recovering drug addict who really needs money to pay for his daughter's heart surgery (leaving aside that he could just set up a gofundme) then it might make us feel bad about all these dudes dying. Of course, killing them in self defense is still 100% justifiable in my book.

The problem with your steelman here is that it presupposes that all human life is equally valuable, or at least that no humans are net negatives on humanity.

The problem with the rebuttal is that it presumes that every single work of art is of practically infinite value... but in reality you gotta draw the line somewhere. How many randomly selected humans (or, shall we say, randomly selected countrymen of yours, so there's a CHANCE its your family members) would you sacrifice to preserve Michelangelo's David?

The world may be tangibly poorer if the Mona Lisa is destroyed, but its actual impact on human life is negligible.

Like, I'm not arguing that burning the Library of Alexandria WASN'T a grievous loss for humanity, or that we shouldn't want to preserve cultural heritage. Just... taking the position that we should be MORE upset by the destruction of a piece of classical art than the unnecessary death of a human being (and for argument's sake, assume they were a net-positive human) seems suspect. I'm not sure how you can draw any bright-line moral rules around that assumption.

Saying you'd sacrifice a particular human in exchange for preserving a particular work of cultural significance will disgust a significant portion of the population.

What if they volunteer?

And how can man die better 
than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers 
and the temples of his gods?

How many randomly selected humans (or, shall we say, randomly selected countrymen of yours, so there's a CHANCE its your family members) would you sacrifice to preserve Michelangelo's David?

Zero. But mooks working for a crime syndicate? Quite a few, recovering drug addicts doing it to pay for a kid's surgery be damned.

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