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Thank you for taking the time and effort to write these posts. As I understand it, your argument is more or less as follows:
There is a large inferential distance between yourself, as a former soldier and a representative of the Red tribe, and most of us on this forum, who went to university young and are mostly some form of international knowledge worker.
This is not something we can see ourselves. The equipment being used to do the looking gets in the way of the looking. As with the matrix, only a situation that forcibly relocates our worldview will allow us to see what you're getting at.
This inference gap, to the extent that we're capable of seeing it, is basically that we ultimately see things in a systemising, academic way. We are armchair professors who sit down and discuss abstract ideas like race, class, representation. We believe in the existence and importance of Society with a big S. We spend most of our lives in urban environments where social convention and rules are more relevant than fundamental natural laws.
Because we discuss in those terms, we're incapable of stepping back and seeing that this is all just people. By discussing the culture war, we inevitably find ourselves seeing the world on the culture war's terms. You aren't sitting in traffic, you are traffic.
Therefore it is acceptable to describe the average Mottizen as a progressive, even if we vehemently reject that classification, because ultimately it's true. From the perspective of one who can stand outside, we are part of a modern movement which uses a lens that is fundamentally incompatible with what we say we would like to conserve.
@HlynkaCG This is a bit short and muddled, but how close is it? I have thoughts but will put them in a different comment.
(Continued from the above)
I have some innate sympathy with this position, because I have personally known very intelligent people who had blindspots you could drive a bus through and they couldn't see it however gently you led them.
I used to think somewhat similarly to you (perhaps, inferential distance and all that). I was a Cameron Conservative in the UK (kind of like a Reaganite conservative in the US). I really believed in colourblindness, and treating everyone as an individual, and in equality of opportunity. I scoffed at left-wing abstractions like the Establishment, manufactured consent, class conflict. Most of my extended family were army officers.
And then the wind changed.
Without any particular intention to do so, I got caught up in a proto-Culture War conflicts in 2015/2016. I won't bore you with the details, but I learned very quickly that what was said did not matter. There was no meaningful possibility of persuasion. The way you won conflicts was by controlling the people who were in the room to vote. The usual mechanisms for that were to get the committee secretary to slip in lots of boring business before the meaty stuff, so that anyone who didn't care enough to listen through hours of bullshit and miss supper left, and by making life miserable enough for the people who stayed that they didn't come back. I also learned that it's impossible for a man to win a public argument with a crying woman.
The Brexit vote happened maybe a year later. The pattern was stark. Mostly the university staff (cooks, cleaners, etc. were in favour). Every single academic and student was against. Every. Single. One. Even outside academia, again and again I would find myself the only one in the room. At best people would be interested, at worst they would say vile things without even considering the possibility that someone like me could exist. (Those who expressed doubts about mass vaccination during Covid will recognise the feeling). The Establishment did exist, and I'd just fallen out of it.
By your taxonomy, maybe this makes me a failed progressive, I'm not sure. But what I feel like is a failed Conservative. I tried to be an individualist and I found that in this place and at this time, individualism is wrong. There really do exist mass movements of people that you describe with an abstraction like "whites" or "blacks" or "the Establishment". In a world ruled by identarian leftists, which one of those groups you get pattern-matched to, and the relative status of that group, really does matter - it changes what you can do, what you can say, and the consequences for doing so.*
The live-and-let-live rugged individualism that I think you would like us to follow is not adaptive. A predator has appeared that exploits its weaknesses with great efficiency. The Kendi card beats the MLK card at trumps. You can sit there in splendid isolation as you lose your money, happy that you stayed true to yourself, or you can find a different card.
I don't know what that card looks like. Accusations of anti-semitism were very powerful against Corbyn, groomer discourse seems to get somewhere. To be honest, I think it's too late for the UK - we've imported too many immigrants and we have too few children. We are going to be cursed with a permanent disaffected ethnic minority and the resultant identity politics from now on and I can't see anything we can do about it in the time left. So it goes, I guess.
But if you are sure that the most important thing for conservatives is that they hold fast and don't get seduced by the poison of identity politics, please consider it possible that you might be wrong.
*I have a strong feeling that you are going to say, "Nope, you can say and do whatever you like. That's your decision, and the consequences will be whatever they are." Bugger that. There was a time I didn't have to self-immolate to have a sensible conversation and I want that time back, please. And call me a coward, but if I'm going to kamikaze I want a reasonable estimated return on investment.
Say rather, it will not maximize material outcomes when you are the only one doing it.
On the other hand, nothing good will ever happen unless a critical mass of people do it.
Further, no critical mass is possible if everyone else is waiting for others to do it first.
Finally, there are things more important than maximized material outcomes.
The game-theoretic logic you are describing is doomed. People adopting this logic is why everything is going to shit. It cannot make things better, only worse. Self-immolation is not necessary, yet, but what will keep it at bay is for people to live by worthwhile axioms, rather than sinking to the level of their environment. That doesn't mean walking into the office and laying down truth-bombs until you're dragged bodily from the premises. It does mean figuring out what your principles are, and living by them, regardless of the outcome.
Fair enough. Serious question: What is your plan for obtaining a critical mass?
From where I am standing, you and I are the possessor of exactly one human body each. Those bodies exist in the vicinity of many, many other bodies and so, whether either of us like it or not, they must contend with game theory.
The power of tyranny comes from fear. Fear is generated and maintained by observing punishment. Every time someone stands up for their principles without a plan to survive doing so (or at least to extract net benefit), I believe they are making of themselves a sacrifice to feed what they hate. So the outcome matters. Whether your beliefs work in situ matters. I’m not arguing for nihilistic pursuit of gain, but I am arguing for pragmatism, and sacrificing your lower-level principles when they’re sabotaging your ultimate ones.
I think we are going to have to suffer. As long as you require a reasonable return on your investment you will remain hostage to the powers that be.
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