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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I know that I'm beating a dead horse, but if you're going to keep bringing it up, i'm going to keep saying it...

The root problem is that the beliefs and values of modern (ie post-modern) liberalism are not conducive to, and in some respects actively incompatible with, forming healthy and stable relationships. The decline in marriage and birth rates is a direct consequence of this, and I do not believe that this is something that can be solved via legal or economic interventions, you need to change the culture.

Liberalism has been around for hundreds of years. The internet killed fertility rates. And evolution will take care of that in a generation or two if we don't nuke ourselves or singularity ourselves out of existence. The people that can keep having kids while taking cheap dopamine hits will pass on those precious horny doomscrolling genes. And life will continue.

What are these beliefs and values of modern liberalism, as you understand them?

Specifically i think that liberalism's emphasis on individual emancipation and self-actaualization when coupled with the post-modernist desire to offboard agency and responsibility to impersonal forces results in a worldview that actively incentivizes social atomization while amplifying and exacerbating "cluster-b" personality traits.

There does seem to be a general trend that whenever you elevate a single aspect of a culture or a single ideology to define an entire society, that society breaks down. To give an example, if you look at most historic western countries post 1776/1789, they tended to function on a mix of liberalism, local denominations of christianity, nationalism (which was historically tied to liberalism), regionalism, and tons of other local values and traditions. It's the same everywhere; all societies inherit tons of different values that are in negotiation with each other. When you try and elevate a singular value system to dominate all the others or erase all the others, that's when you have problems.

Sometimes it can be clearly disastrous, like in the case of Communism or Nazism, but other times the damage is more insidious. "Hypocrisy" often is not just someone lying for self interest; it's often a thoughtful and useful compromise between two or more values both of which are important.

I feel it's like trying to convince pandas in the zoo to fuck, when they just want to sleep and eat bamboo. Maybe it makes more sense to import some white dogs and paint them to look like pandas. If a lineage doesn't want to sustain itself, there just... isn't much to be done.

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