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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.

Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “

Say No To School. Choose Life.

Meritocracy is unsustainable. The idea that one could skip competing in life and get a low paying job and have kids ignores the fact that you would likely end up with an unattractive partner. A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder. You aren't getting an iq 120 woman with a beautiful body and high general factor of personality if your life is mediocre.

In traditional societies, people didn't have to worry about competing to the same degree. If your father farmed you farmed, if your dad was a blacksmith you became a blacksmith. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a zero-sum game for who can post the most travel photos in tropical countries, get the most educational prestige, get an attractive apartment etc. If you can't get into a good college, you can get a master's degree. If you didn't get the top job after graduating, you can become a middle manager at a mediocre firm and outrank the junior at a good one. By trading time for status in a zero-sum game, people are incentivized to push life ahead of them and not settle.

Eating disorders are a lot rarer in traditional societies. Lip fillers, overtly sexualized social media and obsession over appearance are having a ruinous influence on women's mental health. Instead of marrying one of the guys next door, they are either going to absurd lengths to compete or having poor self-esteem for not looking like a tiktok model. Instead of giving people a place in the world and treating with them respect for filling the role that place fulfills, we have a race in which we judge people's worth and moral value on their place in it.

Sorry if this comes across as edgy, but have you considered the possibility that the "travel photos in tropical countries", or at least that which they are a proxy for, are not zero-sum because travelling to tropical countries is actually enjoyable for many people? Personally I'm also partial towards apartments that do not come with black mold in the bathroom and an air-blowing heater-cum-AC that has the noise level of living next to a busy airport like the first one that I had to live in in the US did.

I often see the internet right work off of a model of humans that leans in the general direction of "the serfs would still be happily plowing the fields while wearing potato sacks; anything more they get is useless for them and just part of a zero-sum competition for status". To the extent this claim is not just an unfalsifiable value assertion that denies agency to vast numbers of people, it is sufficiently at odds with people's self-reports and intuition that it needs more evidence than vaguely pointing at eating disorders and Instagram anxiety and claiming that these are sufficient proxies to compare the all-around utility of the present unfavourably to that the past.

If you ask those questions of me personally, the answer for most of them is "yes", based not just on what my understanding (through reading the occasional old text) of medieval peasants but also just comparing myself to members of my parent generation who have still inherited an older work ethic, scarcity-oriented life philosophy et cetera. For the general population, I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced that these are the right questions to ask either - is self-report actually the end-all measure of utility, or could we look at two equally happy people and say that the happiness of one of the two is actually more legitimate?

More importantly, even if we find no difference between the peasant and the modern youth in all of those criteria (or even a difference favouring the peasant), symmetry remains broken in the other direction in that scarcely a modern youth would be happy to trade places based on a description of the medieval life but almost any medieval peasant would be based on a description of the modern one. In fact, we can surmise (based on experience in the Cold War and social inequality within modern countries) that the mere presence of those who live the modern template causes any zeal, excitement and eudaimonia of those who live a life of back-breaking work to feed themselves to evaporate.

Considering that, doesn't it seem facile that theories such as the parent poster's always single out a form of society that just happens to align with their aesthetic preferences as the one that actually makes people happier? Communists also have a good case that the life of occasional deprivation and abuse under a planned economy - especially coupled with the occasional drives for purpose such as a push for space colonisation - would have been superior to our abundant anomie, and that the people living under it were merely rendered unhappy because the Capitalist West gratuitously flexed its abundance in their faces. In fact, in this way, perhaps the West is really to blame for the unhappiness of serfs anywhere, be they communist, feudalist, or the underclass in a capitalist society! Following down that train of thought may lead you to a very socialist place.