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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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It’s a reality in cultures with traditional conditioning, although I understand that it’s hard to imagine such a thing in our present culture where, as far as I can tell, there does not exist a single piece of media or art, or a even single role model, or even a song or a small paragraph of text, intended to condition the values of thanks, selfless love, meekness, or obedience in women. These are the fruits of traditional social value conditioning, with heroines and saints and God, and cultural behavioral techniques like meditation in the east and prayer in the West. Were you born in the time of Albrecht Dürer, girls would venerate “Mary meek and mild” in the same way they now venerate some ice skater or pop singer, and you would meet women like Mama Dürer who had zero stress despite living hell on earth:

We do know that he had a very close relationship to his mother, Barbara Dürer, who was only nineteen when Albrecht, her third child, was born. In the course of the following twenty-one years she gave birth to another fifteen children, the last in 1492. All but Dürer and two very much younger brothers died; as he describes it: ‘some in their childhood, others as they were growing up’. Reading his observations on his mother’s nature in his Family Chronicle, we are struck by the associations they evoke of contemplative descriptions of the Virgin Mother. Thus Dürer tells us that her favourite pastime was to speak of God and praise him, that she suffered ‘illnesses, poverty, mockery, contempt, and snide words, fears and obstacles, and yet felt no spite’, but quietly continued ‘her pious ways and acts of mercy to every man’, observing her children’s religious upbringing, and habitually receiving and dismissing Albrecht and his brothers with the same phrase: ‘Go in the name of Christ’.

On its face, training women in such a fashion does seem delusional, absurd, ridiculous… but the thing is, all the other options are even more delusional, and in fact have never been done before. Germany with its incredible maternal benefits failed to move the needle, and they will be a lot poorer for the next centuries. If what we want is happiness and existence then I think we have to throw away the false gods of individualism, “self-actualization”, and “education” (the very things which got us into this mess, and other messes).