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Is wokism fundamentally the same thing as so called "slave morality?"
The way this issue came up for me is that a few threads back I claimed the following:
To which another individual responded as follows:
I was only vaguely familiar with the concept of "slave morality" so I had to look it up. This actually seems like the sort of thing for which AI might give an intelligent answer; here's what I found:
This does seem to ring a bell, but I think there's an important difference. In the drama of "slave morality," there are two players, the masters and the slaves.
By contrast, wokeness follows what Lawrence Auster used to call the "liberal script"
In other words, there is (in my opinion) a third and key set of players in the wokeness movement -- elites (or aspiring elites) who pursue self-aggrandizement by advocating on behalf of Nietzsche's "slaves."
So it might be better to call it "striver morality" as opposed to "slave morality."
It has been a long time since I read Nietzsche in length, but from what I recall, I think it's worth noting that Nietzsche's ideas about slave and master morality were complex. On one level he despised slave morality, yet he also clearly saw its strength, its success at shaping values. What he called slave morality is the actual master morality of our time, and he knew it. He admired the power of Christian priests to overthrow the ancient world's moral order, their tremendous ability to transmute values within themselves and dominate the world with their new values like some sort of superhumans from a Dune novel. This somewhat echoes what @functor said below about how slave morality is an elite phenomenon.
The so-called slave morality is completely dominant in our time. I do not know about other parts of the world, but in the West is difficult to find anyone who is not genuinely mentally deranged and/or deeply ostracized by mainstream society who truly believes that it is good for the strong to dominate the weak - truly believes, not just as an fun intellectual exercise, a vice-signalling online grift, or a fetish. So-called slave morality completely penetrates both the left and the right in the West. This is why outside of a few online ranters with Greek statue avatars, who I'm not sure even actually believe in what they say and in real life are probably mostly very nerdy people who are either grifting or desperately trying to compensate for their lack of power in the real world, almost everyone on both the left and the right believes in the vision of the plucky oppressed rebels overthrowing the evil empire. The left and the right just disagree on who the rebels are, and who the empire is.
And this is not surprising. The left and the right grew up on the same movies, and popular movies are about plucky underdogs fighting evil empires. This moral framework has almost completely won. It utterly dominates our civilization, it shapes most people's consciousness on a deep level. The so-called master morality has been driven from the field and only survives as the suppressed shadow of the "slave" morality. The so-called "master" morality survives in hiding in obscure crevices of consciousness and among freaks and obvious sociopaths. It persists psychologically in the great appeal that antihero narratives have for moderns, the sex-and-violence Game of Thrones depictions of lustfully and openly wicked people which serve to still satisfy some of that ancient craving for master morality, a craving that likely cannot go away as long as humans remain human. This is also the reason why sociopathic gangsters are so popular in our media - the mafioso, the inner-city gangbanger, and so on. We still have a need to psychologically engage with "master" morality, but almost none of us actually believe in it on a deep level.
No politician can expect to win more than a small fraction of the public's support by running on a ticket of "it is good and beautiful that the strong dominate the weak". Even Adolf Hitler did not campaign politically on master morality, he campaigned on the notion that Germans were plucky underdogs who should overthrow the supposed oppressive evil empire of the Jews, the French, the British, the Bolsheviks and so on. In other words, even the most prominent far-right politician of the last 100 years ran his politics based on slave morality, on the same script of plucky rebels going up against an evil empire, not based on some sort of "master morality" appeal to the beauty of the savage and dominant aristocrat.
Wokism is a "slave morality" phenomenon, but as Nietzsche would have understood, it is also a master morality: it insists on its values, it revels in dominating its enemies, it seeks to conquer, it seeks to stamp its values on the entire world, it believes utterly in its right to rule and to destroy its enemies. Today's right-wing populism is also almost entirely a "slave morality" phenomenon just as much as wokism is. Outside of some narrow highly online circles, the modern right-wing populist does not believe that he has an aristocratic right to rule through strength and beauty. He believes that evil aristocrats have taken over society and that the "good people" have to fight against the "evil people" to overthrow their domination. Ironically, right-wing populism has not so much that masterful steel in its backbone that wokism does, it is not as much of a master morality. But then, it is young in its current open form. Modern right-wing populism is ideologically almost exactly the same as it was in the 90s, the difference is that now it has breached the containment walls of polite conservatism and escaped the online forums and small clusters of paleoconservative fandom to which it was largely confined in the 90s. So it is possible that right-wing populism, too, will at some point become more psychologically confident in itself. I don't really see it moving in that direction right now, but much can change very rapidly in politics. One thing I'm fairly sure about, though, is that it will not take the form of actual ancient-style master morality. If Hitler's political movement didn't, then it is extremely unlikely that any of today's right-wingers will do it.
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Said it before, will say it again. It's not uniquely Western or even Christian. An Indian Army general echoed the same thing nearly verbatim in 1988. Psychology calls it Martyr complex. I don't think wokeness is anything that sophisticated. It only works specifically for the interests of women, blacks, muslims and LGBT over men, straights and whites. The "oppression" bit is just moral cover for that fact. The biggest beneficiaries of DEI are white women, irregardless of income brackets. Western society and IMO human nature tend to be very gynocentric, that is why we care so much about issues that affect women, and causes that they care about generally.
I didn't see anything in that article to support that claim. Closest was this:
However, like most points in the article, it's uncited. Although since she as a BIPOC has Other Ways of Knowing, perhaps I should just be quiet while a Black woman is speaking instead of Noticing her general lack of citations. And in what is basically a codified trope now when it comes to blacks writing about racial matters, she does not clarify whether she is talking about per capita or not, nor is it apparent if she understands the concept of per capita in the first place.
Naturally, upon a Googling there are quite a few NBER papers that discuss women, non-Asian minorities, and affirmative action, so it's unclear what research she has in mind. It’s also possible she doesn’t have any actual research in mind and was just regurgitating a passphrase she read elsewhere. One paper from the search results caught my eye, though.
In the context of federal contractors and subcontractors, the paper suggests the "affirmative action program [] is generally ineffective for women, although it has been effective for minorities." And by ineffective, he means "affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace." The author explains:
Note that the paper is from 1989. It's darkly hilarious how long affirmative action has been around, when for some reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs. I'm going to tell my children that affirmative action was invented after Saint Floyd was brutally murdered by a MAGA insurgent in 2020.
Especially within education, it doesn't pass the sniff test that white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, especially on a per capita basis. Women have similar average IQs as men (or exhibit a modest deficit if you're Hanania-pilled), but blacks have substantially lower average IQs than whites. Thus, there's a lot more ground to make-up in the latter case through affirmative action.
Indeed, Table 2 and Table 6 of this paper show that, in the 80s and 90s, the black-white coefficient (expressed as an odds ratio) was 4x larger than that of the female-male coefficient from logistic regressions modeling undergraduate admission chances at elites schools. The authors remark that "[f]emale candidates have 50 percent better odds of being admitted than their statistically equivalent male counterparts" in contrast to the 450% increase for being black instead of white. I didn’t see the analogous figure quoted for female vs. male, but the authors additionally report that being black instead of white was worth +230 points on the SAT; being black instead of Asian was worth +280 points on the SAT.
I imagine the female-male coefficient has further shrunk since then, given undergraduate females now outnumber males (thus presumably less need for pro-female affirmative action). I do believe in ${CurrentDay} there are larger affirmative action preferences given to women at the graduate level for admissions, and in hiring and promotion decisions in academia and industry (especially in sectors like tech and finance), but this would still pale in comparison to the corresponding racial preferences given to blacks.
Now back to the original article complaining that white women have Always Been the Primary beneficiaries of affirmative action. It Just so Happens the proposed next steps involve transferring ever moar money and opportunities from whites towards blacks and latinos, especially black and latina women. She does some ducking and weaving in bouncing between talking about "Black and Latina women," "Black, Latina, and Indigenous women," and "Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian individuals." For the aforementioned third category, she has this to say:
Considering racial benefits given to blacks and latinos often come at the expense of Asians, this sounds amusingly like she's threatening Asians. I came away with a similar feeling after reading her article as I did after reading OU Samantha’s Essay—namely, feeling slightly dumber.
Yes. On of my relatives was a career US military officer, and he described to me the methods through which his branch incentivized recruiters to find diverse applicants (this would have been roughly around 1989, a few years in either direction IIRC).
It seems to me like that the opinion that things just went off the rails recently is very common. I suspect there are a few reasons for this, one of them being the ability of the internet to form a coherent counter-consensus against institutional power, and one of them being that the forces of woke or whatever you want to call them really overextended in the 201Xs, using rhetoric that diverged from the more defensible "make society better for the marginalized" and veered into "make society worse for the unmarginalized." And then finally it seems to me that given the above, there is a very strong incentive for many people who see themselves in the middle to say "woah woah woah, [consequences downstream of X] are clearly too far," while glossing question of whether or not X should be removed since it caused the downstream consequences because fundamentally they support X, or something like X.
There are probably some other reasons I am not thinking of, but I find it interesting that, even though affirmative action has always been controversial, it seems like opposition to it has really been consolidating into something that might actually "stick" beyond grumbling about political correctness. It's interesting to me that this turn took about a generation, perhaps 1.5 generations ("affirmative action" dates to 1961) for the wheel to turn this far. A real reminder of both how slow and how fast society can change.
I do, however, suspect this may have happened before – with progressive overreach in the 1960s and 1970s fueling backlash leading to Nixon and Reagan. So I wonder if part of the "reason many people seem to think it started sometime in the 201Xs" is simply because a lot of younger people had grown up in an era where progressives/leftists were more chastened (Clinton) and cautious about letting their most radical members steal the microphone and run away with it. But by the time of Obama, they had grown overconfident again (and people who would have pushed for more moderation were aging and sidelined or dead or retired) so the fringes ran away with the microphone and now we're getting Nixon all over again. As one of the younger people, I'm not sure if it's different this time, but it does seem to me that, however you slice it, the question of wokeness definitely goes far back beyond 201X.
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Wokeism is the opposite of slave morality. It is a tool of the elite to beat its own population. It is a way for a corrupt oligarchy to claim that their subjects are evil, undeserving and morally reprehensible. Wokeisms purpose is to invert noblesse oblige.
BASED AND FACTUAL
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Wokeness is slave morality because it's a Christian blank slatism with the numbers filed off, original sin replaced with racism/colonialism and no Jesus/salvation sin forgiveness figure. Thus transitively it is also slave morality as its ideological source.
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Eh, "slave morality" is just a boolight. I ignore any comment that invokes it, because they are trying too hard to edgelord.
If you're objecting to the word 'slave', then it can easily be euphemized as a superior/inferior axis. The meaning does not change.
Wokeness is the emanation of the brown/LGBT/feminist ressentiment against the spectre of 'white supremacy', which has expanded from mere racism to the entirety of what we would consider to be western civilization. Jealous iconoclasm and seething historical revisionism aside, is this not a collection of inferior moralities, of 'oppressions', trying to find a common superior morality to abhor?
You may disagree with Nietzsche, you may even disagree with people who use his concepts rhetorically, but it is absolutely not a boolight. It is being used in its intended purpose.
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And yet here you are... Merry Christmas
And the same to you. Just finished cooking, serving up, and eating the dinner, so am now in a turkey-and-carbs stupor and noodling around online while I digest the meal and work up an appetite later on for "filling up the corners" 🎅
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One of Scott's best recent works is a deep dive on the modern embrace of slave morality and he explains a lot of social and artistic trends that have been bothering him.
Matt Yglesias Considered as the Nietzschean Superman
...
He doesn't use the word "wokeness" in this post but you can read between the lines.
Warning: it is long, even for a Scott post.
Highly recommended. I literally didn't understand the concept of master vs. slave morality until reading this post, and then huge chunks of modern culture began to slot into place for me.
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(from Scott's piece -- thanks for referencing it, it's nice to see he's still sometimes not completely pozzed -- by which I mean fully accepting of one particular form of slave morality)
You can't, though. Not with the slave morality definitions of badness and cruelty, which e.g. require that I bankrupt myself saving all of Pete Singer's drowning kids -- it's cruel for me to allow them to drown and bad for me to restrict them so they can't keep jumping in the lake. You either have to argue over the definitions of badness and cruelty, or yeschad.jpg. Guess which is master morality?
It becomes a lot less altruistic if you add in "...and I will be the one who did it", as the people who do that rather typically do. People with master morality will sometimes make everyone better off for their own glory. Elon Musk, yes, but also Andrew Carnegie and many others.
Indeed.
Thanks, Pete—now that I think about it, I do value my suit more than I do the life of some other random dude's kid. What now? A glance at the kid might even tell me if the expected value of his life is negative to mine and that of my descendants, which would make the call even more straightforward. Plus, maybe my suit brings me more happiness than drowning brings the kid sadness.
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I don't follow. Why can't one say slave morality is stupid and disregard it and be a yeschad.jpg that tithes 10% to EA charities and selfishly spends the remaining 90% on themselves?
Getting rich while building great things and doing noble deeds for status (which can be cashed in for hedonic utilons) still seems strictly better than doing ugly things just for money to cash in for hedonic utilons. The first one is more altruistic, even if it's just as selfish at its core.
I see the point of Scott's article as an appeal to give the status to the first kind and not mistake the second kind as status worthy.
Because giving 10% to the enemy when you can give 0% to the enemy is stupid. Even where EA doesn't veer off to the left and go full woke, or waste money on a Berkeley Villian Lair, they miss the boat; there they were, buying mosquito nets, when they should have been put a lot more money into malaria vaccines.
Your language bakes the assumptions of slave morality into it. Building great things is ALREADY good; you don't need to take the money and do "noble" things with it.
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I don't think this holds for most of Christian history. Yes, you had to fish the babies out of Roman trash heaps. I don't think Christians, once they had the power, were against using it for their own good.
This fits Alfred Nobel, who gave his money to do something to glorify his name after the invention of dynamite. But...this is slave morality too no? He already achieved something great, yet he was so guilty he needed to do something to atone. All great men possess agency, but they're not really free of slave morality either.
Bill Gates already was a great man, giving away his money to strangers merely to improve their lives (some might cynically say as a way of washing off his more unsavory reputation as Microsoft's ruthless head), hell this entire notion of billionaires handing off their money is pretty Christian (it's of dubious acceptability in Islam iirc).
I'm pretty sure Gates gives money away to strangers to control their lives. He says he "fights poverty and disease" but damnit the recipients will do it the Gates Foundation way. Nobel certainly seemed more guilt-ridden. A purer version of what I mean is those whose main business makes people's lives better; this applies to Musk and Bezos and Carnegie -- his steel business rather than his later philanthropy.
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I think it depends in how strict we are with our definitions of master morality. If saving children is considered neutral, having possessions is virtuous, and losing possessions means losing virtue then yeah, you are right. But consider another perspective: You will not save every child on earth, but you will save every kid in your local community. This way you are perhaps still losing a lot of possessions. Your nice suit, the money you had in your wallet when jumping into the pond, maybe you invest in people to watch the shores and so on. But in return, you become a pillar of the community. Someone that people look up to because you embody a kind of intrinsic worth. Meanwhile, your community is enriched by the presence of young people which over time can make you more virtuous. They might buy stuff from you and make you richer. You might compete with them and win.
Same goes for the virtuous warlord. From one perspective, the virtue comes from your conquests through slaughter. From another, the virtue is in your ability to best others. In that case, the virtue is there whether you choose to fight or not. If there is no just cause for a war, then you can surely use your abilities in different ways that benefit your people and still shows how virtuous you are in that sense.
What master morality has a problem with (and thus the problem that slave morality has with it) is not doing good. It's not that the master never does anything good or nice, or that he doesn't do so on even just pragmatic grounds. Even a pagan aristocrat like Caesar saw reason to be seen as liberal and generous (generosity coming out of overflowing capacity is okay).
It's the leap to "okay, but you can help everyone in your community". It's the totalizing, the flattening. There's no community, this is an idea from slave societies. We're not equals. Some people are better than others and their capacities matter more. In fact, caring about everybody denies them the aristocratic surplus they need to achieve their potential.
To use an example: let's say a Frenchman could sell the Mona Lisa to a billionaire who really wants to burn it and, in exchange a million nondescript, randomly selected people across the globe (no Frenchmen) will be saved from death. The part of him that feels this is either obviously right or not easily argued against is slave morality. The part that recoils sheds light on the impulse behind master morality. There's just something here worth more than some people's lives. And that impulse would almost certainly be called cruel if articulated, if it came down to a choice.
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You are proposing a solution that ignores the tradeoffs. I cannot save the children and invest in people to watch the shores and so on, because I have limited resources. If I spend them saving the children I will never get to the point of having enough to hire other people to watch the shores. I could take something like Carnegie's view and let the kids drown until I'm rich enough to do something about it without destroying myself, but slave morality would reject that as "cruel".
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