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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Needs more continental philosophy.

Joseph de Maistre wrote 'La contre-revolucion n'est pas une revolucion contraire, mais sur le contraire de la revolucion'. An important line, but incomplete by itself- de Maistre left his philosophy on reacting to the French revolution incomplete, because the reactionary impulse, by itself, is simply a leg of a Hegelian dialectic which will synthesize into a less extreme version of the revolution. Which is exactly what happened in France.

By itself, opposition to revolution is merely driving the speed limit. What is needed is a paradigm shift to escape the revolutionary paradigm. And central planning does not have a good historical record for constructing a paradigm.

I notice you talking about guarding your family and weathering the storm. What you don't talk about is forming a community with likeminded families. You must network, man is a social animal. Your children will defect if they don't have friends. They will defect if your subculture does not offer a pathway to becoming an adult. You need other families for this. And out of that group a paradigm will arise organically, a very similar paradigm to the pre-revolution, but not exactly the same because it's a different world. And a different paradigm will naturally tend to form independent institutions, which grow slowly, over generations, until you eat the revolution itself.

Finding a like-minded community that is in my same socio-economic class, age, and willingness to be "apart" from the world is difficult, especially since my wife is more liberal than I. I like what https://becomingnoble.substack.com/ and https://blog.exitgroup.us/ are trying to do, but I think those are too "right-wing" coded for my family.

You will need to conform yourself to a group- what did you think ‘community’ meant, thoughts, presentations, essays? Band together.

Of course, you could also simply be out of luck. An unwillingness to abandon individualism won’t get you anywhere. But civilization defining ideas shared with other families might, because the future belongs to those who show up. You can as part of a group influence the next generation. You cannot do it on your own. Yes this entails making compromises on your preferences. But the alternative is to forfeit the field.

It's damnation both ways. Hold to individualism and forfeit the field to nothing. Discard it and forfeit it to whoever the leaders are. Only actual winning move is to become the leader, and there's precious few slots available.

So? What's wrong with having a leader setting the field?

Nothing, if you're the leader. Otherwise, you're just a tool.

You mean a follower? Again, what's wrong with that?

What's wrong with living, working, and existing for the benefit of someone else's vision? If you don't see it, I'll never be able to show it to you.

Who said anything about someone else's vision? If your vision isn't shared, then it's not going to happen. End of story. And someone has to be in charge of a group. Mathematically, that's probably not going to be you(see: definition of a group).

You'd really rather have the future look like... nothing you're a part of than have someone else call the shots?

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