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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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Sure, it runs on boys suck it up; girls suck it up.

Well, no. (Actually, I'd argue traditionalism really doesn't "run" on anything so much as it is a mostly-blind adaptation to it. But this is also coming from someone who sees [the kind of person who becomes a] traditionalist and [the kind of person who becomes a] progressive as the exact same thing, in their hearts.)

The problem here has always been economic. Before the advent of the "energy wherever we want it"- hallmark of the early 20th century- that was literal man power. There's a concept called "primary and secondary goods" that explains this pretty well- men extract primary goods (sexual dimorphism gives men an advantage in this area), women turn those primary goods into secondary goods (including children, it's worth noting). The problem, of course, is that while not having secondary goods is bad, not having primary goods is catastrophic. Sociofinancial power, then, is naturally controlled by men.

And so here's where I tap my sign: traditionalism (Abramic religions most famously) simply doesn't have an answer for when [the place men get their power from] is supplanted by technology- except for the null answer which is "turn inwards and die"[1]. And this resulted in two things:

  • Men are constantly berated/judged for a lack of progress in avenues to power [which brings with it attractiveness] that no longer exist, and
  • Traditionalism had no other significant check on the sociopoilitcal power of women beyond that which was imposed by the state of nature

Which is why traditionalism gave way to progressivism, and was also why the 20th century (and especially the first half) was full of alternative answers to one or both of those questions (what that answer actually was depended on the local conditions: communism is a natural fit for places with a low ratio of people to economic opportunity like Russia or China [or the entirety of the Middle Ages- equally worthless is still equal], whereas fascism is natural for places with a high ratio like 1930s Germany). Technology naturally drives this ratio down, which is part of why fascism really isn't a viable answer today while communism remains sympathetic[2].

Those questions still haven't really been resolved, because the winner of that conflict was the only remaining frontier nation (that didn't at the time, and still doesn't, have any productive way to answer this question beyond "be rich lol") that threw resources at the conflict until it vassalized basically the entire world, and if your society has a more productive answer to that question you'll just get invaded. So it goes.


[1] Now, I get that a lot of men really do like this [even some intelligent ones, on occasion]; especially since the Taliban spent 20 years providing an object lesson to the West in just how successful a strategy like that could be, and the fact the largest cities didn't even bother to resist them suggested that Taliban rule was what [the men responsible for holding up the US-led order] wanted all along. Which is a valid assumption, because the US-led order offers literally nothing to men, and if it happened in the continental US many believe that a campaign of white feathers would be ineffective.

[2] Socialism naturally occurs in populations where the variance in ability to extract that economic opportunity, and the variance in that opportunity, is low (for a variety of reasons both internal, like bad land, or external, like being a vassal state of a greater power); liberalism naturally occurs when it is high (great powers not being liberal is historically unusual).