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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.

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.)

Have you heard of the Amish concept of Rumspringa? It's a traditional period when Amish youth "hop around" getting into a little bit of trouble, ordinary rules are suspended all together or only lightly enforced, after which the young Amish can choose to be baptized into the community as adults, when rules will be enforced.

That's high school and college for middle-upper-class Americans. Ordinary social and even legal rules aren't enforced, some activities can be done in high school and college that can never be done (for most people) in later life. If you're a 1/500 athlete at 16, you're a star on your high school team and a big deal on campus; if you're a 1/500 athlete at 36, you might have a hobby that you're pretty good at but most people don't care about. If you're a 1/1000 musician at 16, you're in the school band and playing lead roles, or you're in your own band and you're a big deal at parties; if you're a 1/1000 musician at 36 no one cares about your soundcloud.

In college if you're a bright kid, you can spend all night discussing philosophy or history with other bright kids, if you're the brightest you can hold a little court at the Algonquin in your dorm room; if you're a bright guy in your 30s, unless you're bright enough to have a substack no one cares except the other dorks on your message board. In college all I needed for a girl to think I was a romantic was a DVD of Midnight in Paris and a bottle of cheap wine; in my 30s well, I'm married anyway, but if I wanted to impress women it would take time, effort, money. And worst of all, if I wanted any of those things now, I would have to go find actual people. And finding actual people after college is harder for most people: as the quote ran around Twitter "Half the reason folks romanticize college is because it's the last time most folks lived in dense, walkable neighborhoods focused on providing community during plentiful off-hours." When you're in college single women your age are everywhere, other pseudo intellectuals are everywhere, your friends are a short walk away.

You don't get to be an athlete, an intellectual, or a lover after college; not in the same way you do in school, not unless you're really talented. There's room to be above average and feel extraordinary, do extraordinary things. In adult life, for most people, those opportunities are lacking.

In his excellent, and now both old and prescient, Coming Apart Murray argues that Upper and Lower class white Americans are becoming more and more stratified, with upper class Americans being more likely to preach left-wing tolerance while practicing traditional middle class morality; while lower class Americans are more likely to believe in solid family values while practicing dissolute and self-destructive lifestyles. His core thesis isn't as interesting to this argument as his theory that Upper Class/Blue Tribe/PMC Americans basically fail to practice what they preach: marriage is more common among white upper class college educated Blue Tribers than it is among working class white people, yet college is synonymous with hook-up culture and dissolution.

I propose that we can think of high school and college as a kind of Rumspringa in Blue Tribe culture, a period in which ordinary rules are suspended. You can't do the things you do in high school and college after you graduate, when you have to be a good and respectable member of the community. So of course the jealousies of high school and college run deep, run forever, scabs that keep getting torn off again and again. Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.

Because it's not that they missed the opportunity to do X in college because of those damn bullies; it's that for some people, rule following people, your hall monitors, they now missed their entire opportunity to do those things. They missed out on the easy parties, fun hook ups, the intellectual and athletic honors, their whole share for their entire lives. They'll never get over that, because they don't have the spirit and agency to do them later.

The parallels between this worldview and the "Nice Guy™" narrative of "I'm such a good Male Feminist, why don't women want to date me and instead want to date those braindead gymrat chuds who treat them like dirt?" are impossible to ignore. See also Tony Tulathimutte's marvellous short story/novella "The Feminist".

That was in my mind writing it, but I felt the comment was already too long for the value of the thought.

What a lot of people miss about the Alpha Male/Beta Male or Jerk/Nice Guy distinction is that it is ordinal and contingent, rather than universal and genetic. The Alpha is the Alpha because no one around is better, the Beta is Beta because the Alpha exists and is better. But the Alpha's existence is contingent, he could die or simply never be born or enter that space, in which case a Beta moves up.* Position in society is a contingent occurrence, outside of extremes of perfection there is no such thing as a pretty girl or a strong man. There can only be in any context the "prettiest girl" and the "strongest man;" followed by a succession of relatively prettier/stronger subordinates. It follows that there is no such thing as an ugly girl or a weak man outside of extremes of deformity or disability, only relatively uglier or weaker individuals. The latter identity depends on the existence of the former.

In modern alienated urban capitalist adult life, hierarchy is ersatz, it varies quickly between locations and people; the PUA game is to create the illusion of being the strongest man, even though that is an irrelevant concept.

But in the hothouse of high school, the hierarchy is a little more visible, you know who the strongest are. Speaking personally, I tried out for the basketball team freshman year, as is typical for me I was the last one cut, but I was cut. At some minor level, this lead to identity formation for me: I came to see myself as weak, and I came to identify more by intelligence than physical ability. I came to read stuff like the ancient pre-TRP Ladder Theory website and identify myself with the "nice guy" archetype as distinct from the dumb jock/CHUD. But, I wasn't cut from the team because I was weak or slow or ungainly; I was cut from the team because I was weaker, slower and less graceful than the other players. Eliminate a dozen of them, or just put me at a smaller school, and I'm a varsity basketball player in high school. How would that have affected my identity formation during those years? Would I have identified as a jock if only Bobby and Kyle had decided to take up golf instead of basketball, or if David and Juan's parents had respectively decided to move elsewhere?

The Nice Guy, inasmuch as he exists as an archetype, is only ever a couple of promotions from being a CHUD. Which is why women directly experience that dating the Nice Guy Male Feminist so rarely delivers being with a Nice Guy Male Feminist; getting a girlfriend is the ultimate promotion in status, so as soon as he has one he starts to act like a CHUD. The act of dating the Nice Guy inflates his ego and makes him stop being Nice.

So I guess my critique of The Feminist is that it doesn't matter if his shoulders are narrow or not, it matters that he perceives that they are narrower.

*This is one of those Platonic concepts that stretches from the man to the polity; see the Jews in 1944 in Poland and the Jews in 2023 in Palestine.

Did you mean "Chad" instead of "CHUD"?

This one?

A unattractive person whose defining characteristic of their personality is their egotism. Most often used to describe typically one-dimensional preps, chauches, or the like. A particularly mean insult; it should not be taken nor thrown around lightly.

Interesting. I checked Wiktionary before asking.* It has two (relevant) definitions:

  1. (US, slang) A gross, physically unappealing person.

  2. (chiefly US, Internet slang, sometimes derogatory) A person on the political right, and/or who holds socio-political views seen as regressive or bigoted.

The Urban Dictionary definition does say "unattractive", but your usage seemed to be more about personality, so neither of Wiktionary's definitions seems to fit. I guess this is a third meaning.


* "Normal" dictionaries aren't very good when it comes to obscure slang, and Urban Dictionary is sometimes helpful but is often full of completely unrelated nonsense; see e.g. the two entries that define "chud" as, respectively, a kind of poo and a piece of chewing gum. Both of those are on the first page, and there are 30 pages of definitions for "chud".

I hear it as just a vague slur for right wing or mainstream men. It's not really that deep, you could replace it with Chad or jock or whatever, I just used chud to mirror the above comment.