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Is "the problem would not exist in a hypothetical situation we have no means of reaching" a useful insight, or does it even achieve anything apart from lazy demoralisation of those who do try to find something they can do to solve it?
The useful insight is that throwing money at parents clearly doesn't seem to work, so let us do something else. That starts by figuring out why people are actually not having kids. Whenever I speak to other young people about parenting, they usually give one of the following reasons:
Clearly, these issues are not about money. The problem is that raising a child takes time and energy that could have otherwise been spent on living the young adult dream of getting a degree and otherwise living a carefree life in your twenties. Unless you want to give every young family a full-time maid, or have the government adopt the newborn baby in exchange for a pile of cash, then you are not going to solve this by throwing money at people.
When parenthood is seen as a side objective at best, and at worst a straight up hindrance to your own happiness/fulfillment, then of course birth rates are going to fall. I don't see a solution that doesn't involve changing the narrative.
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It seems backwards to me that you think cultural changes are harder to implement than policy changes. Its a form of Democracy propaganda that I see often enough that its worth addressing.
Changing culture is hard and slow, it involves talking to a lot of people, convincing them, having role models to hold up who are paragons of the change you want. If you are pushing against specific incentives or people then they will try to reverse the cultural changes you are making.
How do you get a democratically elected government to change policy? You have to change base cultural desires of the people so that they change their voting habits often and consistently enough. And you need to tailor the policy to make it survive through whatever political process exists in the country.
Cultural change also has the benefit of snowballing effects. If you have some good ideas and good culture it self advertises as it spreads. Democracy requires a minimum 50%+1 starting point. So good ideas and terrible ideas have somewhat equal chances to getting implemented.
I'm not sure changing culture is hard and slow as opposed to perhaps poorly understood? Culture sure changed fast in March 2020, and against in May/June 2020.
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Changing the culture is very fast and very easy to do when the government wants to do it. Look at any communist revolution, or look at the way every modern TV show has an unnecessary gay character.
Most people are Havel's Greengrocer. There is not a political thought in their heads. When the party line changes, they change along with it, and don't even notice the difference. Orwell had them pegged. Animal Farm and 1984 are not novels; they are documentaries.
In the age of mass media and compulsory education, culture is imposed from the top down, not bottom up. Public opinion is a function of whose army is guarding the TV station.
Democracy is a sham. It doesn't matter who gets elected, the bureaucrats remain the same, the teachers remain the same, the university professors accrediting the teachers remain the same, and the people making movies remain the same. So, of course, nothing changes; it's the same government! Voting for the other party is voting for a change of décor.
Changing the culture is a coup-complete problem.
Animal Farm was a documentary. Nineteen eighty-four was not - it was a warning, and one that has so far been effective in preventing the thing warned about. The USSR never managed to achieve the level of social control you see in Oceania, and not for want of trying.
1984 overestimates the competence and underestimates the infighting of a large organization. The Party wants to control and monitor citizens so it can do what exactly? Even "for power" ignores certain Party members vying for power over others, threatening the entire system because it gives them an advantage. (I didn't finish the book, so if it actually explains this, sorry.)
I doubt even AI will solve this problem.
Part of what Nineteen Eighty-Four shows is that the Party spends far more time monitoring its own members than it does monitoring the proles. You don't see the internal politics of the Inner Party "on-screen" (O'Brien is the only Inner Party member we see, and for the first two thirds of the book he is putting on an act to entrap Winston Smith - in particular we know that the telescreen was still recording while "turned off"), so you don't know how the Inner Party monitor each other. But a large part of the book is about how the Inner Party manage the Outer Party (through constant surveillance and loyalty testing) vs the proles (with bread and circuses on one hand and exaggerated foreign and domestic threats on the other).
"The Book" (in-universe title "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") purports to be written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the clandestine opposition, but Winston Smith gets it from O'Brien so we don't know who actually wrote it. It functions as an author tract describing the nature of the Party regime, although it is of dubious reliability as a factual description of Oceanian politics. "The Book" says that ambitious, able and demonstrably loyal (with a subtle hint that part of demonstrable loyalty is being an unprincipled sadist) Outer Party members can join the Inner Party by competitive examination, but that most ambitious Outer Party members get wiped out by the Thought Police. Most, but not all, Inner Party members are children of Inner Party members, although this isn't official policy and the authors of "The Book" think that it isn't unofficial Party policy either, just normal nepotism. "The Book" also says nothing about the internal politics of the Inner Party, and is ambiguous about whether Big Brother is actually real (Stalin's dictatorship) or not (Breznhevian oligarchy).
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I think it's actually pretty spot on. The woke aren't terribly competent, and they have lots of infighting, but they're able to reproduce the Party structure from the book pretty faithfully. The only thing missing for them is the technology / infrastructure.
The party structure of the book was based off of actual Communist party structures, was it not? The woke may simply be getting it passed down from the original sources.
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The woke aren't nearly as successful as the Party: while they have significant influence, Trump's faction exists, this site exists, and even on Reddit (outside the most extreme echo chambers) and in-person interactions with left-leaning people, I consistently see and hear the most extreme woke ideas (analogous to 2+2=5) repudiated by the majority.
You can find analogies to everything in 1984 (Two Minutes Hate, doublethink, etc.), today and in Orwell's time. But as bad as our society is wrt. conformity and top-down control, it's nowhere near 1984. I do note that mass surveillance is gaining in certain places (e.g. the UK), but it's stalling in others, and I suspect only a matter of time before it gets crippled because some group uses it for something stupid.
Yeah, but I think all that is more a question of insufficient technological infrastructure, not infighting or lack of competence. They're already building what they need. Give them a few years, and things will start looking a lot more 1984-ish.
We have much more invasive technology than Orwell’s time (some, like AI, surpass that in 1984). And arguably we have less overall freedom (at least it’s harder to commit crime without getting caught), but again, much more than 1984 citizens.
In a few years our leaders may actually not be human (if we achieve ASI and it merges with and/or overthrows them). Then it is plausible we’d be put into a 1984-like society (temporarily, but that may be a long time: until the AI can do everything more efficiently than humans and promptly exterminates us, or the Earth becomes uninhabitable, or aliens invade, etc.). While I can’t imagine why an omnipotent (from our perspective) AI would even give humans the choice to rebel, it’s possible 1984 is the best configuration for a non-omnipotent AI. But that’s just one possibility: if keeping humans alive is useful, I think giving them some agency would also be.
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That's not because the warning was effective, that's because the technology didn't exist. Now that it does, China happily jumped in head-first, but more interestingly, Europe, after spending decades wagging their finger at China, are now eagerly creating their own infrastructure for mass surveillance and control.
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I think that goes too far.
There are some cultural issues where I do believe the government exerts significant cultural force.
It tends to be on issues that question the legitimacy of the state, the tax apparatus, and democracy itself.
But there is plenty of cultural leeway on things they don't care much about. And there are things they sort of care about where they exert some minor pressure.
I think natalist stuff is something they sort of care about. They prefer you having kids that go to government schools and drink the cool aid of system indoctrination. Homeschoolers fought an uphill battle, but have mostly been slowly winning in a bunch of states.
Child tax credits didn't have any major detractors. "Pro choice" doesn't call themselves pro abortion or anti natalist.
I just don't think the model of natalist culture as a government defended cultural view is accurate.
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This seems like you redefining influential members of the culture as the real government in order to argue that the government controls the culture. Of course you aren't going to think the government is weak if you redefine anyone with power as part of the unofficial government. But someone who agrees with you but is using normal definitions is going to say that the the control of the U.S. government over culture is weak, and when they coincide it's generally because an influential cultural faction controls the government rather than the other way around.
Definition issues aside, I think you're also very mistaken about it being top-down. I saw the rise of SJW ideology, and it didn't originate from film-makers or bureaucrats or teachers. It was developed, refined, and spread by posters on websites like Tumblr and Something Awful. The influence over institutions like media outlets came later. Some of the words and ideas originated from academia decades earlier, but plenty was altered or brand new. "Demisexual" originated from a young teen girl on a play-by-post roleplaying forum (used to explain why her slutty RPG character had sex with some characters but not others) and spread when another poster from the same forum made a Tumblr post about it as a joke. Now plenty of big official institutions and university professors and so on take it seriously. (The original girl now identifies as demisexual herself, having "discovered" that she was projecting it onto her character, while the Tumblr poster regrets having accidentally unleashed it on the world.)
The rapid rise of SJW ideology had less to do with the power of the people creating or spreading it and more to do with a sort of selective memetic immunodeficiency among institutions and much of the public, with the internet serving as a breeding ground for ideas that maximally exploited those openings. To the extent that specific people were influential at all it was by being the sorts of weirdos who posted on the internet a lot and/or became skilled at internet posting. Not every change in culture is going to follow that pattern, but in the internet era I think such changes tend to be grassroots.
The government can influence culture a lot more if it's killing anyone who publicly disagrees and engaging in very extensive and relatively successful censorship. That doesn't mean every country (or the world as a whole) works the same way, or that establishing a totalitarian government is easier than influencing culture in other ways. There are multiple communist groups in the west who think engaging in normal politics is a waste of time because communism can only be achieved through violent revolution. Needless to say they're a lot less influential than the Something Awful posters who spent a decade refining their shitposting skills to amuse a few hundred other forum posters, then discovered those skills were transferable to influencing millions of people on social media. Which isn't to say that direct mass-appeal on social media is the only way, Scott Alexander demonstrates another approach.
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