@Jesweez comments on "Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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Jesweez 2mo ago · Edited 2mo ago

Brings to mind a good Substack article I read the other day: https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/youll-regret-it

Most European countries have already had one or several acutely manic phases in their past, the kind of energy that drives you to burst out into the world and do whatever you please until you’ve got a damn empire.

We might have had one or two in the US already, surely when we conquered the whole west from sea to sea, another when we came in and destroyed the axis powers and unleashed the greatest weapon ever deployed onto the planet.

But we’re still a juvenile culture and we’re currently in one of those manic phases of adolescent grandiosity. We can do anything!!! Just you fucking watch and try to stop us.

I don’t know if age always fully quiets down these impulses. Some pretty old cultures also get the itch from time to time. But we do have a radically smaller library of experiences to draw from as a culture and that might shape our behavior in meaningful ways.

We also suffer from a sort of rich kid who never faces consequences syndrome. Due to our privileged geography, we’ve pretty much never had our ass truly kicked or even realistically threatened by a foreign culture, like most other countries have. The only true at home ass kicking we’ve ever had was one we did to ourselves. A basic trauma that essentially all global cultures know intuitively, we just have no experience with.

I do think the cultural memory of these experiences ends up being important in shaping the psychology of a nation. And the US, we just haven’t lived enough to learn certain lessons that other cultures have.

There’s good and bad things about that, just as there is with the psychology of youth and maturity in individual humans.

Context

Capital_Room rather dementor-like Jesweez 1mo ago

America has all the hallmarks of high culture and deep habits, except perhaps for a time measured in millennia

Julius Evola would disagree:

The US has been compared, not without justification, to a melting-pot. It actually presents us with a case in which a human type was formed, with characteristics that are to a large extent uniform and constant, from out of a highly heterogeneous raw material. Emigrating to America, men of the most diverse peoples receive the same imprint; after two generations, except in rare cases, they lose almost all of their original characteristics, reproducing a fairly homogeneous unit in terms of mentality, sensibility, and behavior: the American type.

In this regard, theories such as those formulated by Frobenius and Spengler, who have asserted that there is a close relationship between the forms of a given culture and a kind of “soul” bound to the natural environment, to the “landscape” and the original population, do not seem applicable. Otherwise, an essential part of American culture would have been possessed by the indigenous element, which consists of Amerindians, the redskins. The red Indians were proud races with their own style, their own dignity, sensibility and forms of religiosity; not without justification, a traditionalist writer, F. Schuon, spoke of the presence in their being, of something “aquiline and solar.” And we will not hesitate to assert that had it been their spirit that to an appreciable extent had imbued – in its best aspects and on an appropriate plane – the human material thrown into the “American melting pot,” the level of American civilization would probably be higher.[2]

Instead, besides its Puritan-Protestant component (which, in turn, as a result of its fetishistic emphasis on the Old Testament, possesses many judaized, degenerate traits), it seems that it is precisely the negro element, in its primitivism, that has set the tone in important aspects of the American psyche. It is already characteristic that when speaking of American folklore, it is to the Negroes one is referring, as if they were the original inhabitants of the country. Thus, the famous Porgy and Bess by the Jew Gershwin, which deals exclusively with blacks, is considered in the US to be a classic work inspired by “American folklore.” The composer has declared that he lived for some time among American blacks in preparation for this work.

But the phenomenon of popular and dance music is even more conspicuous and general. Fitzgerald was not wrong when he said that in one of its main aspects, American civilization can be called a civilization of jazz, i.e., of a negrified music and dance. In this domain, very singular “elective affinities” have led America, by way of a process of regression and primitivization, to imitate the Negroes. Assuming there would be a need for frenzied rhythms and forms as a legitimate compensation for the mechanical and materialistic soullessness of modern civilization, one would have done much better to look to the many sources available in Europe: we have elsewhere mentioned, for example, the dance rhythms of South Eastern Europe, which often have something truly Dionysian. But America has chosen to imitate the blacks and the Afro-Cubans, and then from America the contagion has gradually spread to all other countries.

…

The brutality that unquestionably is a characteristic of Americans can well be said to have a negro character. In the happy days of what Eisenhower was not ashamed to call the “Crusade in Europe,” as well as in the early days of the occupation, we had the occasion to observe the typical forms of that brutality, but we also saw that at times, American “whites” went even farther in this respect than their negro comrades, whose infantilism, however, they often shared.

Generally speaking, the taste for brutality now seems to be ingrained in the American mindset. It is true that the most brutal of all sports, boxing, originated in England, but it is in the United States that its most aberrant forms have developed, and it is there that it has become the object of a collective obsession, soon transmitted to other nations. Concerning the taste for getting into fights and coming to blows in the most savage manner it is enough, though, to consider the greater part of American films and popular detective stories: vulgar fist-fighting is a constant theme, evidently because it corresponds to the tastes of American audiences and readers, for whom it seems to be the symbol of true masculinity. America, the world leader, has, on the other hand, more than any other nation relegated the traditional duel to the status of ridiculous European antiquated rubbish. The duel is a method of settling disputes, following strict rules, without resorting to the primitive brute force of the mere arm and fist. There is no need to point out the striking contrast between this American trait and the ideal behavior of the English gentleman, despite the fact that the English made up a component of the original people of the United States.

Another obvious aspect of American primitivism concerns the concept of “bigness.” Werner Sombart has successfully put his finger on it in saying that “they mistake bigness for greatness.” Now, this trait is not found in all non-European peoples or peoples of color. For example, an authentic Arab of the old race, a redskin, an East Asian are not overly impressed by merely material, quantitative, ostentatious size, including that related to machinery, technology and the economy (apart, of course, from already Europeanized individuals). It is a trait found only in truly primitive and childish races like the Negro. It is no exaggeration to assert that the foolish pride of Americans in spectacular “bigness,” in the “achievements” of their civilization, reek of the Negro psyche.

And as for:

Evola continued with this:

Here, we ought to mention the oft-repeated nonsense about Americans being a “young race,” with the tacit corollary that they are the race of the future. It is true that a myopic gaze easily mistakes regressive infantilism for true youth. Strictly speaking, according to the traditional conception, this perspective must be inverted. Despite appearances, recent peoples, since they came last, are the most removed from their origins, and as such must be considered to be the most senile and decadent peoples. This view, moreover, corresponds to the organic world.[4]. It explains how paradoxically, the similarities of supposedly “young” peoples, in the above sense of late-comers, with genuinely primitive races that have remained outside of world history, and explains the taste for primitivism and the return to primitivism. We have already remarked upon the American predilection, from an elective affinity, for Negro and sub-tropical music; but the same phenomenon is apparent in other domains of more recent culture and art. We could consider, for example, the glorification of “négritude” by existentialists, intellectuals, and “progressive” artists in France.

It follows that Europeans, including the imitators of the higher non-European civilizations, demonstrate, in turn, the same primitive and provincial mentality when they admire America, when they let themselves be impressed by America, when they stupidly allow themselves to be Americanized and enthusiastically believe that this means catching up with the march of progress, and that it is a sign of being liberated and open-minded.

Pour la bonne bouche, we will conclude with a significant statement by a far from superficial American author, James Burnham (in The Struggle for the World): “There is in American life a strain of callow brutality. This betrays itself no less in the lynching and gangsterism at home than in the arrogance and hooliganism of soldiers or tourists abroad. The provincialism of the American mind expresses itself in a lack of sensitivity toward other peoples and other cultures. There is in many Americans an ignorant contempt for ideas and tradition and history, a complacency with the trifles of merely material triumph. Who, listening a few hours to the American radio, could repress a shudder if he thought that the price of survival [of a non-communist society] would be the Americanization of the world?” And unfortunately, to a certain extent, this is already happening.

netstack The horse embodies the wings a person feels inside. Jesweez 2mo ago

I, uh, don’t think that’s a very good model.

First: the historical limit on an empire wasn’t ambition. It was logistics. You sprawled out until you hit a natural barrier (steppe, jungle, ocean) that was wider than your baggage trains could handle. Or until you made eye contact with a neighbor strong enough to stake out its own borders. Transport tech changes that first limit; military and economic tech pushes the second.

Second: it’s not like having those phases ever taught any nation anything! Look at 19th century France. Look at the interwar period. Look at today’s Russia. If the logistics and industrial fundamentals aren’t present, the best you’re gonna get is one generation. Then the revanchists will wrangle enough support for another round.

Third: what do you mean, a smaller library of experiences? There’s no Dune-style genetic memory. Institutional inertia is a joke and a political liability. Our President has more information available than anyone in history, and this is what he chose to do with it.

Southkraut The rain fell gentlier. netstack 2mo ago

Germany here. The 20th century happened (because of the 19th!). The 21st is still not over it. So long as you keep this stuff warm, it lasts a very long time. It's baked into institutions, in a widespread and very visible manner that is by no means a joke, and continues to decisively shape people to this day and for the forseeable future. People in turn make sure the institutions don't drift away from the program. There's no need for living memory or genetic memory - culture and institutions do the job on their own, where the job is "make sure everyone learns the lesson, no matter how exaggerated or oversimplified or obsolete it is.". The Germany of today is intentionally the near-polar opposite of the Germany of the early 20th century, to a self-destructive degree, but we make very sure to stick to our programming because obedience is the only path to social acceptance.

Jesweez netstack 2mo ago · Edited 2mo ago

I do think historical experiences affect a cultures outlook and subsequently behavior.

Modern Chinese politics is meaningfully affected by the century of humiliation.

The tone of Slavic cultures is shaped by repeated wars, famines, and massacres.

Turkish politics is influenced by memories of the Ottoman Empire.

There’s certainly a forgetting curve. We probably shouldn’t study Charlemagne in order to understand what Emmanuel Macron is likely to do tomorrow.

(Edit: Then again, Charlemagne looked back to Roman emperors, was himself relevant to how Napoleon behaved, the French Revolution drew from ideas from the Roman republic, and modern France has dim recollections of all of this built into its cultural identity as well as experiences from both victory and defeat in the world wars. Part of the founding mythos of being French includes empires and revolutions and it gets reflected in French behavior, such as a penchant for frequently protesting and rioting in the streets. Just as the American frontier is long gone but still affects our culture).

Continuing where I earlier left off…

But I do think there’s some historical continuity that gets built up. Having had all your cities razed, suffering a famine, conquering half the world, having an empire crumble, I think all of these things have influences on a culture that ripple across centuries.

Americans today always talk about how we are so optimistic while Europe is just this museum society. But basically all of those cultures had periods of floridly mad optimism in their history at different points, usually coinciding with when they built those structures.

Maybe we are just a uniquely optimistic and exuberant culture and will remain that way forever. But we haven’t even existed for long enough to know the other side of the coin, we’ve never even had the experience of being bested by a rival for example. And although it’s tempting to believe that we’re uniquely ordained by God or fate to never suffer such a disgrace and will never see the other side of the coin (like from the article, god is an Englishman, we invented the modern world and have its largest ever empire ffs), I’d say our time in the sun has its limits just as it does for all world dominant cultures. (Possibly coming soon if you believe Ray Dalio’s model). And after having experienced both the rise and fall, we’ll end up being a somewhat wiser or at least more mature culture which might naturally temper subsequent bouts of mania.

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