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I've mostly found him boring and annoying. I actually did like him a bit at first when he was just talking about how he lived as a vagrant, but now he feels the need to state the obvious in a kind of preachy tone. He also likes to give advice to young men to move to the middle of nowhere so they can buy cheap houses and work at the general store down the street... just absolute drivel, in my opinion, and he's passing it off like he's actually saying something. So, if he's not some cool free spirit sleeping in a hammock in the trees, what is he, really? Not much. A LOLCOW, maybe, sometimes.
That might be accurate, but I don't think it follows. I don't want to go back home. I want to make my home in the future. The culture war will always exist, and I think the Conservatism INC's habit of perpetually trying to turn back the clock 10-50 years is a huge flaw in their character.
This has me thinking, the idea of "dropping out of the rat race" is very Gen X coded. Youth today think that's "copium" and seem to want to fight for control of the places and positions that matter. One's individual sanity or ability to remain morally-cum-cognitively uncompromised is not as important as the culture war and prestige. And living humbly is just deluding yourself that you aren't a loser accepting loser outcomes.
Michael J. Fox was right to leave Smallville and go to NYC in the 1987 film "The Secret of My Success." And Harrison Ford was wrong to leave for the Mosquito Coast in the movie of the same name. Even if the latter meant literally working harder - for which there are romantic and agreeable vibes - it wasn't working smarter.
I wonder if it's due to young people being raised on social media. The only kind of dropping out they can idolise is the vanlife/digital nomad/world traveller kind that is broadcast on Instagram.
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I'd argue that for an average young Western man today to find work at a general store in the country is not exactly to drop out of the rat race but to find a livelihood that is actually not even bad on balance when compared to his other options for employment.
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I think the Gen Z preoccupation with "staying in the fight" is also downstream of the proliferation of min-maxxer/striver culture. Leaving the rat-race isn't just a loser thing to do, it's effectively prescribing that you will remain a loser indefinitely. There may be some prestige in going your own way and blazing a trail, but it quickly wears off when faced with the prospect of never achieving much of anything, never advancing much of anything, and never being much of a "somebody" at all.
As to whether or not it's ideal to try and be "somebody," that remains to be seen.
i guess I'm not sure that I consider most white collar workers who live in the suburbs to have much prestige or "be somebodies"
I don't think it's a matter of literally having prestige or being prestigious. Rather, living in the suburbs of a metro area at least allows someone to fantasize about or imagine the possibility of getting prestige. If you live, say, in Long Island, NY and work as an insurance agent, you're close enough to the city that you can slip in and engage with the aspirational culture there. Being a bedroom musician, for example, in a suburb of New York has a very different prognosis from being a bedroom musician in Huntsville, AK.
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I'd say the looksmaxxing and e-thotting phenomena are consequences of unrestricted female hypergamy fueling the mating market apocalypse; it's plausible that more and more GenZ-ers are engaging in this among the minority of them that are more exhibitionist and/or psychopathic than average but a much larger part of them is effectively checking out. In China there are actually different names applied to them: rat people, lying flat.
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It's interesting that for all the repudiation of narcissistic individualism and neoliberalism by the new, young right, they're far more cutthroat and "realist" about a mandatory sense of competition in life. They're far more zero sum about things. "You're not in competition with others, just yourself" is a load of hogwash. Dropping out and doing your own thing is looked down as cope. I don't think they believe someone when they say they're unhappy doing something prestigious and wants to quit, even at the risk of becoming invisible. A mandatory sense of hustle, but from their peers, not bosses and older adults, is so omnipresent and taken for granted such that they can't imagine someone not wanting anything to do with it unless they're just sucky losers.*
(This also helps to explain why third parties in politics have become passe. It's thought of as a way of dropping out, and at a time when your cultural enemies seem like they're right on top of you, necessitating remaining in the 1 of 2 political tribes and with gusto.)
They're the least Buddhist people in the universe.
*Karl Pilkington once told Ricky Gervais that he quit his job as a program manager at a radio station to...walk dogs. Gervais was aghast. "I wasn't happy doing it." How could you not be?!
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There are no single women in the middle of nowhere who will be impressed with your house and stable job at the general store, so this strategy is a non-starter.
Yes there are.
You will, however, not be impressed by those women.
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Right. But there are men for whom "Is there a woman around?" isn't the most important thing.
I forgot who said that one hallmark of intellectualism is thinking there are things more important in life than chicks. Paraphrasing.
Telling a man to move to the middle of nowhere, get a job at the store, and become a monk is not exactly a great sales pitch. Or the kind of thing that will positively change society at any scale.
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While I agree, the follow on statement of "Yes, but we need a future oriented conservatism" is actually a landmine. "Use what worked in the past, but adapt to the present / future" was the entire ethos behind small-l liberalism. And it led to psychotic progressivism. It's no wonder that the current conservative ethos is heavily reactionary.
My attempt to square the circle is; embrace certain unchanging eternal truths and do not let them slip or yield in the face of any kind of future. No surprise that I'm of the conservative / traditional catholic bent. But I'm also not Amish. In fact, I think a strategy for Conservatives (be they INC or wildcatters) should be an approach to technology in general as a means to re-introduce conservative ideas.
(Catholic aside: The Latin Mass movement doesn't exist without podcasts and other online spaces. Roll back the clock to 1975 - 2005 and the Latin Mass was close to dead outside of SSPX / FSSP / ICKSP. )
The replacement of classical liberalism with “woke” is exactly why classical liberalism did and does need to adapt. Likewise, the Amish may genuinely live more happy and sustainably than the trad posers, but the posers’ culture is more popular, and their simple life (a necessary ingredient of their happiness and sustainability) means they don’t have the force to stop it. Ultimately, you cannot recreate the past, only a crude imitation with misery nostalgia; the only way forward is to combine multiple elements of the past to create something novel, analogous to entropy and evolution.
That doesn’t mean classical conservatism nor liberalism will completely lose to their replacements. Those are after all inferior in many ways. The future will take some of what the present does right and some of what the past did right and leave out some of what each did wrong. I wish we would take classical liberalism’s idea tolerance and coherence and adopt it to modern trends…but what ideas the future takes and leaves, ultimately no-one can know.
They can’t stop it, but neither can you. It’s not stopping unless the entire culture accepts and supports conservative views. Which isn’t happening.
The trads are not trying to undo all of western progressive culture, because that’s likely impossible for them. Instead, they propose to build enclaves where they can keep their kids safe from the kinds of ideas and material culture that exists in the rest of the world. It’s a redoubt, a fortress intended to at first provide protection and support for the like minded, but eventually have enough power to make changes.
Oh, the Amish survive, and classical liberalism and other niche ideologies with at least a few members. It's just that they will never leave nicheness unless they change. Even the Amish, with hundreds of thousands of members and growing faster than the general population, would take 30 years to reach 1,000,000 members at approximately their current rate (3%/yr) - and in 30 years the world will be much different, so it's practically certain they'll adapt in some ways.
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Classical liberalism is dead. What is left of its mantle has been taken over by a few libertarians who can't understand how their preferred policies leave them open to being consumed whole by their illiberal enemies. It turns out there is no stable free equilibrium; for a time, we maintained an unstable free-ish equilibrium based on reciprocity, but that's gone and it's not coming back.
But for the grace of god I go... again... Despite Carl Benjamin's tilting at straw effigies, classical liberalism's primary virtue is not tolerance. It is closer in the moral latent space to an eigenvector of Forbearance, Self-Restraint, and Respect for Autonomy. It requires Humility to recognize that despite moral disagreements one does not have the right to coerce another to a particular moral foundation beyond some minimally burdened social contract.
CL is not "Stable" it is metastable. The required spark to push into into a stable region is one that humans evolutionarily lack. Our socio-cognitive firmware was just not not setup yet to make that leap because evolutionarily it was not effective. We are stuck in an evolutionary saddle point and need an externalized existential disaster to push us forward to continue our evolutionary journey. The son-of-god can preach until he's blue in the face about the need for forbearance, humility, and compassion but humans revealed bible is the bigotry of small differences. We'd much prefer to shank our neighbor for praying to the same deus in a slightly different way.
The next evolution of CL needs to account for that unflattering facet of humanity, it needs an actual immune system and more importantly, it needs to maintain that immune system in the face of several hundreds of years of uncheck dominance. CL won so hard that it became immunocompromised. The illiberal enemies have had to metastasized like a cancer from within because CL could not be beaten from without. People got lazy, complacent, and the tree of liberty went unwatered.
No. If you were in the position of the person you are pitying with that phrase, either the world would be in a such a terrible state that there would be no one to save you, or the people you are imagining would be in your current position would not spare a thought to save you. That is one of the blackpills of the culture war; that mercy is taken advantage of, and restraint is treated as weakness and met with ruthlessness. Your well-treatment of your enemy will likely merely contribute to your own destruction.
There isn't really a bright-line difference between "metastable" and "unstable". Either one, a small perturbation pushes you out of the stable region. What held us there was reciprocity -- the threat of retaliation for bad behavior, and the promise of co-operation for good. It has failed. Bad behavior was justified and retaliation declared illegitimate, and co-operation was not offered. We're out of the stable state and I see no way to get us back in.
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Can you name actual, historical examples of "Classical Liberals"?
What did these people think of the French Revolution? Temperance? Communism?
What makes the differences small? Like, I've heard this line a million times, but very rarely with an argument attached that actually demonstrated the basis for the assertion's correctness. It seems likely to me that attacking other humans' capacity for grouping into a homogeneous, stable unity is probably a super-useful predatory adaptation, and my grandmother, what long teeth you have seems like a fitting observation the home coalitions of many who have historically made this claim a centerpiece of their argumentation.
Yeah, see, stuff like this. Assuming peace is easy and so failure to achieve it is a moral failing. Assuming all religions or even all branches of a particular religion are basically the same, and so conflict is de facto unreasoning. Crystal defects are one of those features of the natural world that seem to have a lot of salience at all levels of scale, and the idea that human conflict is a "simple mistake" is both very recent and possessing both remarkably poor predictive accuracy and a strong correlation with other beliefs notable for their remarkably poor predictive accuracy.
Maybe the Son-of-God needed to preach about the need for forbearance, humility and compassion because humans find these ideas so difficult to maintain and generalize.
Certainly it's become clear that religions do need some alignment to perpetuate themselves and to provide public goods.
The desire for absolute doctrinal alignment may be a failure state of bookish religion especially but it's not coming out of nowhere, and the denominations with the lowest attrition rates are not the ones that are blase about differences.
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Or "why Cain kills Abel" for short.
You don't need to use that fancy language or understand computers to communicate this concept; even someone from 1000BC can hear it and know, including that God has a real problem with this, even straight up calling it 'sin' [oddly, 'didn't like the offering' was not sin even though it facially meets the definition of such], but also won't do fuck all to stop it (as a design constraint of creation/humanity, not what He'd personally prefer in that moment [1]).
Diana Moon Glampers is evolutionarily correct, but not morally correct, to kill Harrison Bergeron. Humility is why you're supposed to be angry about that.
So did it for Christianity, for the same reasons.
[1] Jesus as proof.
Why is this in the middle of your analysis? It's two different problems.
If you're this type of liberal yourself, which I suspect you are, then I am truly sorry.
I have no other input other than to remind you that "get laid" [or "reproduce" more broadly] and "die" are in that order for a reason.
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Plato's Republic makes way more sense once you replace "philosopher-king" with "classical liberal".
The distributed biological intelligence system called "life" is incapable of determining whether this problem halts.
Humanity can define the problem, but must outsource this to a meta-intelligence to compute this in any productive way, and in that light a deity whose "graven image" is humanity itself is the natural choice (which inherently frustrates analysis of whether or not that deity actually exists, but that's out of scope).
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The Latin Mass growth post 2005 was not primarily driven by online spaces, it was driven by changes in canon law and existing IRL networks which later had a large online component mostly by tapping into the backlash to pope Francis and later to demand for covid-unconcerned Catholic networks. I was there for much of this and the incorporation of the online component was hugely controversial.
I'd like to hear more about your experience here.
That's fair, but I see this as validating my point with different timing. I'd also very plainly ask if there's a real sense within any Catholic circles - and there could be, this isn't meant to be a leading question - that the online Trad-Cath-o-sphere is, on net, detrimental?
In 2018-2019 there started being large contingents of extremely online young male converts. They didn't fit in very well. Pre-Pope Francis traditional Catholicism, as a movement, had no answer at all; the expectation was that men were in religious life, or else heads of families, with some minor allowance for twenty year olds that were still in college/working on being ready to marry providing that they were connected to an existing large traditionalist family. This was cliquish and unhealthy, but traditional Catholics are not immune to psychotic brainworms. The newcomers often rubbed the locals the wrong way, of course- several got yelled at for hitting on teenagers(in fairness, the teenaged girl/young woman distinction is, uh, not one rad trads are particularly insistent on in other contexts, and is probably not quite as obvious), they were often vulgar by local standards, many were motivated more by political conservatism than the classic motives for traditional Catholics- which are either completely sincere religious motivations, a genuine belief in large families(the average age in IRL rad trad communities is generally middle school, not middle aged... very high fertility rates are part of the program), or moral puritanism- and some didn't seem to realize that they are attempting to join a religion which prides itself on inventing the term 'dogma'. In 2020 this existing tension just kind of blew up into irrelevancy with the sudden influx of... everyone who didn't like their diocese's covid policy(and subsequent growth for the surviving latin masses after TC). The stereotypical tweed and pipesmoke image just generally took a while to integrate newcomers, and while the fourchan types were disproportionately blamed there was lots of frustrations with everyone else too.
The online trad-cath-o-sphere? What do you mean by that? Like Dr Taylor Marshall and lifesitenews have plenty of detractors on the basis of spreading ridiculous conspiracy theories and platforming churchbashing. Taylor Marshall is a nice enough guy in real life, of course, but lots of people who like him as a person and don't even particularly disagree with him would criticize his podcast as Not Helping. Tradcath twitter has the distinction between Nazis who don't believe any Catholic doctrine or go to mass but like the aesthetics and IRL rad trad twitter, both have their critics but the typical IRL rad trad literally doesn't know about the former- they think the complaint about awful rad trads on twitter is, like, the Dimond brothers, and complaints about 'traditional Catholicism as cover for racism' is just libs using their favorite R-word.
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