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Notes -
A Look into Hickman, wherein a Sensitive Young Man discovers the positional utility of money
Link the relevant tweet
I've written about Hickman before because I find him to be a very interesting character. This is a man who was purposefully homeless for years, a self-described constantly drunk anarchist, who then joined the coast guard to clean up his act, become a kind of hardcore catholic that doesn't quite fit neatly into the Online RadTrad mold, got married, had a kid, and now, apparently, self-supports via writing online. He's also something of budding real estate investor.
And although he still "hates money" he just can't deny that it's got some pretty nice features; like being able to live in good neighborhoods where your kids are safe as well as being able to choose the rough outline of your socio-political environment.
Hickman's journey isn't unique overall. It's definitely got a lot of color to it, of course. I see it, however, as a pretty normal process of becoming aware of second order social effects. As kids, we're inherently self-focused. Adolescence brings some awareness of things outside of ourself. Young adulthood continues that up to family formation. For most, however, it takes the actual having of children to ignite thoughts about the beliefs, behaviors, and opinions of larger groups of strangers.
Being 25 and single or dating means I have more or less complete control (or perceived control - memetic influence is for a different thread) over the ideas I let effect me. But a parent realizes that short of keeping their children locked up in the basement, their ability to totally control the kid's ideological intake is far from complete.
It's unremarkable to point out that what happens next is people use a combination of money and social organization to choose and maintain the ideological ecosystems within which their children live. Money can get you access to the right zip codes and/or private schools and clubs / sports. Social organization can get the right (wrong?) books banned from the public libraries, and the right (wrong?) drag queen story hour performers. Enter the ongoing culture war.
The interesting thing, to my mind, that Hickman's post illustrates is the reach of these topics. Hickman, although not living on the street anymore, is certainly on the fringe of "normal" society. He's a very-online yet pseudo Amish dirtbag Catholic who lives in dying upstate NY. Yet is talking in the same direction that leads to HOAs, school boards, zoning, planned communities and all the other things that are top of mind for the most milquetoast suburbanites. Short of a true EXIT mentality, you can't not be in the culture war.
And I think there's something useful here to contemplate in terms of the very Vibes based general feeling of anxiety that generates thousands of thinkpieces across main stream and alternative media and internet outlets. If many of us feel like non-voluntary conscripts in the culture war, it follows that we're fighting the war just to survive and get back home. But then the question becomes "what the hell is home?" There's no 40 acres and a Good Wife (TM) to walk with into the sunset. The HOA has problems with our lifestock and Wifey is at therapy and thinks we need to have a conversation about emotional labor. Or, for my progressive friends, the need to return that 40 acres to the indigenous rightful owners is really getting difficult because of the tax implications of the real estate sale and my polycule keeps breaking up while I'm talking to my lawyer.
Of course I'm having a little fun here, but the point stands; the political dream of the West post World War 2 was that a mix of economic and political liberality could ultimately result in an appreciable degree of autonomy for, at least, an individual if not a family. That no longer seems the case and there's been no real alternative identified. On the left, it's a kind of utopic socialism that can't ever actually work. On the right it's a very vibes based "RETVRN" ethos with some nihilstic streaks.
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.
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.
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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