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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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A brief epilogue to my previous post about the cabal of Former Theatre Kids who appear to be running every significant Western government and international organization:

On Thursday, the official NATO Twitter account posted a thread in support of the Ukrainians which included this jaw-dropping statement:

Ukraine is hosting one of the great epics of this century

We are Harry Potter and William Wallace, the Na’vi and Han Solo. We’re escaping from Shawshank and blowing up the Death Star. We are fighting with the Harkonnens and challenging Thanos.

The official honest-to-God NATO account posted that. Not some third-rate dingbat functionary, like the execrable Karen Decker who posted about how Afghanistan needs more “black girl magic”. No, this is the public-facing voice of a war machine that controls hundreds of billions of dollars, and it decided that the best way to make its case to skeptical world was to spam references to media primarily targeted toward middle-schoolers.

Besides being yet another Theatre Kid shande far di goyim (Rod Dreher had us dead to rights with that line) in an era that has been full of them, I think this is a data point in favor of a pet theory I’ve had about progressives/post-Marxist culturists/“the woke” for a while.

When I see some fat black woman or horse-faced lesbian activist rail against how society “reifies hegemonic standards of beauty and body shape which disparately marginalize the bodies of subaltern identities” or whatever, I cannot escape the impression that these people - mostly women, but not entirely - just never really recovered from the petty traumas of middle school. The jocky white boys were all attracted to the slim white girls with the straight hair, and not to the chubby girls, especially the black ones. And I’m not just taking potshots at my outgroup here; I’m guilty as hell of this in my own life as well. (“We must reimagine masculinity to de-center violence and the domination of others,” says the noodle-armed kid with low testosterone, certain that in the Glorious Future, women will prefer guys like him.)

If we’re getting deep into psychoanalysis, it seems at least plausible that for a certain personality type - highly neurotic (and thus liable to experience negative emotions acutely, leading to traumatic imprinting on experiences that non-neurotic people are likely to move on from with no issues), extremely creative and imaginative, great at constructing arguments and manipulating symbols - combined with some social/physical handicap which places them at the bottom of a local social/sexual status hierarchy, you get a perfect storm that leads to becoming trapped in a sort of arrested development - results in a failure to mature emotionally past that formative period, and a predisposition to escapism translating into political utopianism.

Now, presumably this is where someone like @FCfromSSC would jump in and dismiss my attempt to draw a clean through-line between psychology and ideology. Agency is key, and equipped with the right religious and cultural guidance, anyone with these baseline psychological traits and formative experiences can transcend them, becoming a normal and functioning member of society with a healthy worldview. In this telling, in pre-Enlightenment societies, either 1. this personality type basically didn’t exist at all, or 2. those civilizations were far more adept at social engineering, such that they could far more successfully integrate people like this into their social fabric and find roles for them which utilized their strengths and defanged their more dangerous and subversive tendencies.

I am genuinely unsure whether or not I accept this telling! To hear psychology researcher Ed Dutton tell it, these “proto-woke” people or “spiteful mutants” were precisely the type of people primarily targeted by medieval witch hunts. I tend to intuitively favor the explanation that these people have always been a sliver of humanity; maybe that’s because it gives me psychological comfort to imagine that even in pre-literate warrior nomad societies, there were scrawny little guys like me, preoccupied all day long with stories of the gods and ancestral heroes while they were supposed to be sharpening their spears and hauling bags of cured meats. If it is true that the Enlightenment unleashed the full latent power of this sliver of the population, propelling us first to great heights but then succumbing to the poison pill at the heart of the project, then perhaps this offers a roadmap to reintegrating the “spiteful mutants” back into the fabric of healthy society by showing them both the benefits of giving them a day and the grave dangers of letting them monopolize power. Certainly at the very least they shouldn’t be running NATO’s Twitter account.

If you look actually at what the NATO account posted, they were posting a quote from a Ukrainian journalist turned soldier who said that. Here's a link to the start of the Twitter thread -

https://twitter.com/NATO/status/1628687934000885760

Now, you can disagree w/ any of this soldier's statements, but this isn't official NATO propaganda, in the way you're stating it is.

OTOH, yes, why are you shocked people point to widely known cultural artifacts as symbols. Far more people will know the Nav'i or Han Solo than some random underdog force.

It's cringe, but most change in society happens because normies w/ cringe views get on the same side as activists.

It's cringe, but most change in society happens because normies w/ cringe views get on the same side as activists.

Is this also how the rise of Fascism and Nazism happened?

Yup - the rise of the Trump Right, and QAnon all rose because of stuff a lot of people would consider cringe, as well.

It's cringe, but most change in society happens because normies w/ cringe views get on the same side as activists.

I'm curious as to how well this generalizes across history...

I mean, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a sentimental, overwrought story of the time, and I'm sure the Frederick Douglas and Charles Sumner kind of "cringed" at parts of it, but they also realized it was enormously helpful to get the still quasi-racist Northerners on the side of abolition.