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I want open by saying that I appreciate the point you're trying to make and I appreciate you putting in the effort to engage. Dead serious, comment reported for being actually being a quality contribution.
Having said that though I also gotta say I disagree, and I feel like that disagreement comes down to a difference in what we think we are optimizing for. You say that the Trad-Con position espoused by myself and others is "optimized for a particular model of human social organization", whereas I would argue that rather than being optimized for a specific model/environment it is optimized for a specific job/goal. That goal being to foster empathy trust and cooperation in otherwise dangerous low-trust environments. As it so happens this goal is highly adaptive if you are say, a soldier in enemy territory, a sailor on a ship in the middle of the ocean, or a member of a persecuted minority, and I would argue that this is why our ancestors were successful. Call it what you like "God's Favor" or "Escaping the defect-defect equilibrium" it worked, and it continues to work when those involved actually put the effort in.
Why does Cthulhu seem to swim left? Because right wing memes (more specifically the old-right's memes) are not optimized for mass appeal. Simple fact of the matter is that people do not enjoy being told to sit up straight and eat their vegetables, they do not enjoy being told that they are no better than anyone else. What they do enjoy is ice cream, lazing on the couch, and being told that they are special.
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I’m glad to hear this worldview works for you, but part of the point @Hoffmeister25 is making in my view is that this can’t and won’t work for most people. At least not in and urban modern context.
To repeat my response down thread, Christianity has clearly failed to adapt to the modern, secular worldview. This has been going on since at least the 18th century if not well before then, but the cracks in the religion of the day have been growing. There’s a reason less people are religious than ever.
And I agree that’s a bad thing! Religion is great for people! But if tradcons just sit in their villages and talk about how great their life is and try to push their outdated worldview nothing will change. You need to innovate and find a way to square your religion with the updated understanding we now have of the natural world.
Honestly, I’m rooting for y’all. I’d like to see a return to spirituality, but it has to be a new spirituality that’s true to our circumstance, not one from two thousand years ago.
@FarNearEverywhere this may be a more put together response than my other one downthread.
...and I disagree.
I don't think the issue is that it "can’t or won’t work" I think the issue is that it is difficult and that it's rewards are often deferred.
"Stand up straight, eat your vegetables, and stop thinking that you are any more deserving than the people around you" might not be a message people want but (as @urquan observes) it is often the message they need to hear. Mine is the radical notion that being healthy and being happy requires putting in effort and taking responsibility. It's one thing for a guy to say that he wants to look like Brad Pitt in Fight Club and entirely another for him to want it enough that he changes his diet and starts doing push-ups.
There's a meme floating around that goes "Hard times breed hard men, hard men bring good times, good times breed weak men, weak men bring hard times". If I had to posit a mechanism, it would be that as society becomes more affluent (or "complex" as @Hoffmeister25 puts it) the selection pressure for healthy/pro-social behavior decreases. It becomes easier to get away with being a parasite or becoming a soulless hedonist because you don't know everybody in your neighborhood, and why would anyone want to eat veggies when they can have ice cream? Problem is that if enough people start going down that road shit will eventually hit the fan and when it does it will be those that maintained those healthy/pro-social behaviors that tend to come out alive/ahead.
Where are the hard men bringing good times to africa and all the other god-forsaken places? They've had hard times for millenia. The west has had good times and weak, decadent, civilized men for centuries. Hard men bring hard times, which breeds more hard men.
It's a reactionary, pro-hardness meme, I'm surprised you take it at face value. Christianity is soft. I could see the meme being used by a roman aristocrat decrying this new age stuff, a knight when the church was pushing for the truce of god half the week, or right-wing critics of christianity like gibbon and nietzsche.
I dunno, I think there's a there there, even if it's just a Dissident Right meme. Hard times suck, but they create obvious opportunity to improve. One of the last truly "hard times" faced by the human race was World War II, and the period after that saw the birth of technological revolutions that changed the very fabric of civilization. Consequently, abundance leads to slack, and while we should praise slack, our comfort and abundance leaves us with a hell of a lot to lose--and we may have to eventually lose.
In addition, it's not even necessarily that the men of these times are weak, but perhaps they are just insufficiently-vigilant, and the good times are always at risk of being exploited by a few bad actors. Or perhaps the shine of a glorious new era simply fades eventually and the slack cannot last very long.
I keep thinking of that quote from Akira: "the passion to build has cooled, and the joy of reconstruction has been lost." This was from a Japanese story where Tokyo had been rebuilt after WWIII, obviously echoing what was likely the then-contemporary mood of 1980's Japan, where the economic bubble was at its peak while the Japanese identity was somewhat lost in the post-WWII boom. The movie's climax and conclusion features an explosion much like the one seen at its beginning.
Of course, maybe history is not cyclic (as reactionaries might claim), but progresses (as Christians, Reformers, Liberals, and Progressives might claim), and our current woes in a world of progress, abundance, and slack simply stem from our potentially-softer, worry-free future simply being unevenly-distributed, as per Gibson. You look around the world and you can see places where times are tough, where people are enslaved by the past.
Now that you mention it, WWII is also an example of that meme being wrong. Imperial Japanese and nazi leaders were hard men, especially compared to their western counterparts. The meme would have predicted a win for them and prosperity for their people. Stalin was about as hard as them (it's in his name), but his people did not have a good time either.
Deep down it's a vacuous statement, of the type 'after the rain, the sun' . When you try to use it predictively, it fails more often than not.
I doubt that WWII (or WWI) accelerated much of anything. We were already well on the way to our present technological society. We didn't need huge wars in the 19th century to industrialize and build planes, trains and automobiles. If we had fought such a war, people would thank the god of war for granting us such wondrous gifts. Probably because they couldn't face the fact that millions died for nothing.
...As uncharitable as this may sound, your post reminds of the claim/belief that we'd be in space right now if the Library of Alexandria didn't burn down, which is a viewpoint that has met some skepticism in recent years.
Again, as I stated above, things would be nice if we had the slack to develop, but it's also perhaps inherently unstable. The whalefall is eventually consumed, removing pressure works until things get kinda crappy [epilepsy warning?], and there will always be those who envy you.
WWII was triggered in part by the Great Depression, which was brought about by a combination of some predatory practices on top of classical coordination failures, and even at that time, people were already reeling from WWI, in which many had died for practically nothing.
I think what I'm trying to say is that things can get better, but it often takes some real bad things happening before that to get there.
I'm not saying we would be scientifically much better off. War motivates people, they work in 12-hour shifts etc, but it also destroys lots of stuff and kills people (duh) , so it's a wash or close to it.
Where in there can you use the meme to predict stuff? Decade-level analysis from the 19th century: good times > good times > good times > good times (belle epoque) > bad times (WWI) > good times (roaring 20s) > bad times (great depression) > bad times (WWII) > good times > good times > good times > good times > good times >... > present
That's what I mean with the rain stuff. After good things, there will be bad things, and vice-versa. In a binary sequence, after a 0, there will be a 1 (unspoken: at some point). It boils down to 'things will not stay static forever'.
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