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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31358 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023

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Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.

Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US, yet it lags the US significantly both in GDP per capita (although I am not convinced that this is a very good metric) and also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).

Some possible counterarguments:

  1. "The best talent of Europe came to the US." - But Germany, for example, has a higher average IQ than the US does. In any case, the IQ difference between the US and Europe, in either direction, does not seem to be large enough to be significant.

  2. "Europe has been dealing with the aftermath of WW2." - But that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with, or why the US was not comparably harmed by its Civil War. The US Civil War killed a comparable fraction of the US population to what Europe lost in WW2, but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.

  3. "Europe has been shackled by socialism." - But similarly to my objection to #2, this does not explain why Europe is, to begin with, more fond of socialism than the US is.

Am I getting something wrong? Is Europe more innovative than I give it credit for?

US/Northern Europe per-hour GDP is pretty similar, but US workers work a lot more, hence higher GDP per capita.

but the US Civil War did not fundamentally slow the trajectory of US economic or geopolitical rise.

The US Civil War occurred at the right point in history, around the time of the Industrial Revolution, to allow for this. While the South was economically devastated(and was so for at least a century afterwards), the Northern regions now had an entire breadbasket of cheap agricultural workhorses to harvest from without caring about the consequences.

HBD isn't ever the only factor. North and South Korea are a great example of that. (But note that almost all Americans are recently descended from adventurers, while Europeans on the other hand are descended from the people who didn't go on adventure.)

The EU's economic (and to a point also social) policy is basically corporatism (in the old sense). That makes sense, because that's what Germany has always been like since the Kaiserreich, and France is ultimately quite similar even though it got there via a different route. It's better than communism as an economic system, but it's not going to get you the raw economic performance of USA-style capitalism. (Proponents will defend it on other grounds.) There's been some movement away from it - it was much, much more intensely so as late as the 90s - but only slowly and carefully.

More community cohesion might actually have a drawback as well. People are less independent. If you have to worry about what the neighbours will think, you're less likely to go and try something. The social response to ambition is often: "who does he think he is?". You're not supposed to rise above your station. If you try it you earn the ire of your peers; if you succeed then doubly so, and also your new peers won't quickly accept you.

The USA's quasi-libertarian foundation, though marred as it is by now, helps a lot. You're allowed to be ambitious. The system won't usually actively try to prevent you from succeeding. Worse average human capital - if that even is the case - is mitigated by the fact that the variance is allowed to be a lot higher. The people at the top of the bell curve get to invent things that improve the whole society, and become filthy rich in the process.

Your old friends will generally be proud, not envious. Your new peers will respect you for having managed to climb up, not look down on you for not having 1000 years of nobility behind you. The government won't - at least not nearly as much as in Europe - kick you right back down for interfering with the profits of the 1000 years of nobility.

The ghettos in the cities don't impede that process much. They could, if the problem gets too bad, but the USA is no South Africa yet.

also, it seems to me, in economic innovation (Europe is responsible for almost no major software companies).

With respect to software there are large path dependence effects: large software companies already in the area attract high quality talent which means there's a larger pool of high quality talent to hire from for new companies and that the possibility of an acquisition exit exists, which in turn means VC is less risky and the system feeds back into itself. We'll have to see if the pandemic and the high crime has finally broken the spell.

It would be interesting to see how big of a difference remains when you take out the effects of the software industry.

It's hard to wrap our mind around how much WWII fucked up Europe. The fact that Germany could rebound to where it is today is astonishing, even accounting for the Marshall aid.

Germany is actually a strong example against this entire point. The Marshal Plan is a red herring, France and the UK got more from it than Germany. After the war everybody was predicting that the UK is going dominate Europe economically, because they were relatively unscathed (if I'm not misremembering, I think their economy actually grew over the course of the war). It turned out that Germany not only caught up, but overtook them.

In my opinion the impact of the war on economic development is grossly overstated.

Another explanation - we like it that way. Small scale, cozy, with lots of time to relax, a bit slow? The US can clean it's prime IT hub from human feces. In Eastern Europe capitalism is still wild and people work themselves to the bone. The attitude is different in the west.

Also there are some small European companies that make absolutely critical components and have virtual monopoly. Netherlands with photolithography equipment. And we have the whole fashion thing and premium food and tourism going on.

Europe is both destroyed by WW1 and WW2 and Socialism comparatively to the US. Yes.

The US's resistance to horrible welfare policies is probably due to white reluctance to extend bad policy to help blacks for many years. Yes.

Probably more importantly, a huge country with a common language is a great place to develop things makes for good. Yes.

I think you're understating the effects of the most destructive war in history, and how close in history it still is.

WW2 did make Europe a US vassal, the ACW was a largely internal affair.

In any case, trying to fit large historical trends to current events is a fool's errand. We do not have the hindsight to judge these effects yet.

This is just explained by multi factor analysis. Like the stock market. What are the main historic factors - small cap, value, momentum. I believe there’s like a hundred more.

What’s the big factors for per capita income?
Off the top of my head id guess: HBD, Degree of capitalism, and probably something for geography.

Why is N Korea poor and S Korea rich? Same hbd. One is communists. One is not communists.

What you are noticing is just multiple big factors (my guess is some form of those three are the big three). HBD isn’t the only factor but it’s an important factor.

that does not explain why Europe had WW2 to begin with

European civilisation arose over centuries from the post-apocalyptic mess left in the wake of the Roman empire and was accompanied by nearly ceaseless warfare. The US by contrast arose from a much more stable foundation and then expanded rapidly with the help of advanced technology that made it far easier to maintain and control large amounts of territory. This expansion also had the added bonus of allowing the nation to direct a substantial amount of its energy towards western expansion, rather than having to jostle with neighbours you've been fighting with since days long forgotten. These factors combine to allow the US government to control a substantially larger area than would ever be feasible in Europe, as WW2 quite nicely demonstrates. This control was often fairly loose, but largely unchallenged, resulting in a degree of stability that was not seen outside of the UK in Europe and over an area of territory several times larger.

Europe is a possible counter-example both to various naive forms of HBD and also to the notion that ethno-nationalism is an advantage.

For the record, I do not subscribe to the "IQ is the be-all and end-all" thing some people seem to around here, but I would describe myself as an ethno-nationalist. I would argue that the United States has succeeded in spite of not being an ethno-state, that its multiple massive advantages have been enough to overcome this disadvantage. Imagine what the US could have achieved with all the energy it has wasted squabbling over race, just think of the forests of trees and oceans of ink wasted on writing about it, the brainpower spent trying to find a way to put blacks and whites in a great collective "get-along-shirt", not to mention the smaller squabbles between the other races.

I often see people on here who look at the runaway success of the US and then draw the conclusion that the US way of doing things must simply be better in all the relevant fields. While I believe the US does lead the way in quite a few areas, I also believe that it is quite probable that many of the systems and methods used in the US either simply wouldn't work in a different enviroment or are actively hindering the US, but that again this is compensated for by a few truly staggering advantages. It's like having an 8 foot tall MMA fighter in a competition, you're probably not going to finish first if you're a rank amateur, but you don't have the same pressure to truly get your technique down if you want to win.

One model I think works is that innovation = genius + reach.

Let's clone Archimedes and put him in Sub-Saharan Africa. How much GDP will he generate as a sheep-herder in Mali? My guess is - not that much more than a normal sheep-herder.

Now put him into a computer-science class at Stanford graduating in 1990. The same genius could easily generate billions in GDP.

The United States has a more strongly-connected market than Europe. A genius in the US can impact the world much more strongly than one in a small European country. That European may not even be a native English speaker. And Facebook for Luxembourg isn't exactly going to take off, is it? Not that it matters. As you rightly point out, the best ones often go to the US anyway.

The better question, IMO, is what about China? China has more than 3x the population of the US and an average IQ that is perhaps 5 points higher. I'm not going to do the math right now but I believe this would imply that China has something like 10x as many 145 IQ people as does the U.S.

If these people can connect with each other in meaningful ways, it's possible that Chinese-language research and technology will outstrip English-language equivalents in a completely irreversible way. There is no greater reservoir of high IQ people on the planet than China. These would-be world shakers are kept back by either the CCP or some fundamental attribute of Chinese culture/genetics. I think it's probably the CCP. Overseas Chinese like Terrance Tao perform as would be expected based on IQ.

My neighbors are Chinese and both are very intelligent working in high skilled fields. One is a biomedical engineering PHD working in research and the other is a math professor at a not-quite-Ivy level university. They blame Chinese culture at the base level for this and the actions of the CCP being a reflection and institutionalization of that same culture. Its similar to what we call "crab bucket" mentality, but not exactly that. According to them you can become wealthy in China, and many do, but after you reach a certain level of success it actually makes your life worse. If you achieve a level of financial success in China of say 1 million USD a year of more all of you immediate family will quit their jobs confident in the fact that you will support them indefinitely. Your parents, especially your mother, will expect their own standard of living to be comparable to yours immediately if not sooner. You'll be expected to at the least "find jobs" for dozens of cousins and other socially important members of your family's Guanxi ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi ). Your success wont be your success, it will be everyone's good fortune. So there is no point in working harder and smarter just to have an objectively worse life by becoming wealthy; your family and patronage network will never stop having their hands out as long as you have something to take.

Their solution was moving to the US and lying about how much they make. They send a few hundred USD a month to their parents, which is more than the parents make and represents the majority of their extended families income. If their parents knew how much they actually made they would demand much, much more. They still have to field relentless demands that they get family members into the US somehow, and they have to explain that the US doesn't work that way and they can't just "put in a word" with immigration or otherwise grease the wheels.

I mean a big part of it might be that a higher percent of Chinese geniuses go into things that don’t directly contribute to the bottom line(like bureaucratic ass kissing).

Europe is much more white than the US and is also much more ethno-nationalist than the US

I'd like to see some backing data to support this.

With regards to the first claim, is there a European country with a white population of only 59.3% Also do we count Hispanic whites or not? Because that changes a lot.

I mean, Spain is pretty much 0% non-Hispanic white.

The former is obvious. Per the 2020 census, non-Latino whites make up less than 58% of the US population. As for the latter, it is only slightly less obvious. Unlike the US, most European countries have historically defined themselves in ethnic nationalist terms; the "nation" in "nation-state" has historically been an ethnicity. Eg: In Germany until the 1990s, no one who was not ethnically German could become a citizen.

What about reverse causation or common cause explanations or causal irrelevance?

Reverse causation: economic innovation tends to cause growth, which tends to cause immigration, which tend to cause greater racial diversity.

Common cause: 18th century liberal American values tend to cause both immigration and economic growth etc.

Causal irrelevance: historically contingent factors like slavery and the proximity of a relatively backward country (Mexico) led to large non-white populations in the US, but these were not essential contributors to US growth and innovation.

I'm not endorsing any of these, but suggesting them as alternative explanations.

How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?

I consider myself psychologically even-keeled and don't doomscroll, but unless you actively try to avoid information, nasty stuff inevitably seeps through. For instance, I saw in the last 24 hours a surveillance video of someone carjacking a poor helpless woman at the gas station, and another who wrote that they know of a backyard puppy breeder who has four bitches constantly getting pregnant and living in filth just to cheaply breed and sell puppies for some absurd sum. I think the normal reaction is to feel a combination of anger and sadness. But rationally, that emotional response seems pointless. It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.

I realized that it would be much simpler to frame everything as nature and natural. Crying over a mouse being gobbled up by an owl seems as pointless as doing the same for a fly being caught by a Venus flytrap or a blueberry being decomposed by fungi. These things just happen. I'm not super familiar with zen or its equivalent. Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?

At any rate, I plan to remind myself of this whenever I feel any emotion the next time I see a headline that some DA dropped charges against repeat criminals or some author pulled her novel because some nobody complained that she was culturally appropriating an oppressed minority group. Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.

Observation:

mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral

Conclusion:

and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it,

This observation doesn't have to lead to that conclusion.

The world is the world. You likely won't fix it by yourself. But nature, society and civilization are emergent properties of aligned collective effort by sentient individuals. So, yeah, your efforts won't do anything on their own. But, find like minded people, set up systems, and get things moving in a one direction. Over decades and generation you will see it become the next version society, nature and civilization.

The way I frame it, is to focus on actions instead of outcomes. Plan your actions to best achieve the outcomes. Readjust your actions depending on how badly your previous actions have missed the target outcome. But, don't place any importance on the outcome itself. You have agency, but you do not have determinism. If the action was right, given the information you had, then you did will. The world is the world, it is going to throw unforeseen wrenches in the works.

You have agency, but you also have limited time. Identify your circle of concern and put in effort to help those people & initiatives navigate around nature. But repeated navigation around nature leads to desire paths that eventually becomes the roads that facilitate the future of nature itself.

it's all part of nature

An awareness of this helps you stomach losses and failures more easily. A resignation to it leads to Nihilism.

Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life

Sounds a lot like Indic religions and the 'dharmic' way of life. Both tie the concept of 'harmony with nature' to 'ego-death'.

Most Indic religions can be notoriously hard to capture in short quotes. The diversity of philosophical schools and the the prioritization of metaphor over specifics is not conducive to concise expression. But, newer Indic religions that take Abrahamic inspirations do a better job of being concise and grounded in their claims. In that spirit, I quote Guru-nanak of Sikh-fame.

One must walk the path in accordance with the law of nature, which can be realized only through personal experience. This law (hukami) or will (rajā) cannot be found in any book or discourse. It is within ourselves and can be realized only through experience. This law is within every individual. Seeking it outside is meaningless. One can progress only by understanding it through personal experience. This law is universal. When one realizes this law (hukamai) by his own experience, one’s ego is completely destroyed and one no longer says ‘I’ and ‘mine’. Ego is the origin of karma and of birth. Ego is the fetter that causes repeated birth.

This observation doesn't have to lead to that conclusion.

Strictly/rhetorically speaking you've caught me slipping, but more colloquially I think you follow my logic. Immutable doesn't mean that we have no free will or our free will is unable to bring about any change, but rather that even if you can lift a rock, when you stop lifting it, it will fall back to the ground. A slightly more meaning example/metaphor may be that, if I'm a monkey, and I don't want to be eaten by a tiger, I could learn to climb trees, or perhaps even set up specialized roles within a communal system with other monkeys so one or two scouts alert the rest of approaching tigers while everyone else create tools to hunt down the tigers. But that only applies to my tribe. If a rival tribe's monkey or antelope gets eaten by a tiger, it really does me very little good to lose sleep over it, especially if the other monkey can easily copy my tribe but chose to nap instead. Except this simple cause-and-effect and reap-what-you-sow system breaks down when the tribe of 20 monkeys grows into an ecosystem of a city of a million that's subject to state oversight at 10 million and federal oversight at 350 million, and even if you are keen to set up a scout against the tiger, others can brazenly defect, and when you get too zealous about shooting a tiger yourself, a pack of mules from a far away forest issues you a consent decree to avoid systemic prejudice against the oppressed tigers.

Sounds a lot like Indic religions and the 'dharmic' way of life. Both tie the concept of 'harmony with nature' to 'ego-death'.

Fascinating. Thanks for the insight, though I do not fully understand just from the quote.

It's weird because most outlooks that start with your premise have very strong moral components to them usually. Classical Eastern and Western philosophies center on one's quest to be a good part of Nature, to be a good specimen of whatever it is you eternally and innately are.

To whit, I do not believe Realism of this kind and Nihilism to be compatible.

If nature is immutable, it has an innate quality to it, a particular way of things, an order, which one can upset with terrible consequences.

And you, as part of it, have a duty to avoid this error, you can't just sit it out as an observer because apathy is death.

Of course these duties are much less grand than making the perfect society. You just have to be a good whatever it is you are. Neighbor, husband, mother, worker, student, businessman, beggar; it doesn't really matter what or who you are, but you have to play the cards you have as well as you can. Only because to not do it is a waste.

Of course these duties are much less grand than making the perfect society. You just have to be a good whatever it is you are. Neighbor, husband, mother, worker, student, businessman, beggar; it doesn't really matter what or who you are, but you have to play the cards you have as well as you can. Only because to not do it is a waste.

That is quite important, yes. If you're in actor in the middle of a play and you think that the play sucks, you're not going to make it better if you start stealing lines from another actor because you think you can say them better than he can. That will only ruin the play even more. The only thing you can do to improve the play, is to play your own role as best you can.

How healthy and productive is it to adopt the mental framework that the world, along with all of its problems, is simply nature, and so is amoral and immutable, which means we should expend no energy trying to change it, and should instead focus on making sense of as much as we can while adapting to the reality as it is?

As an individual, this is exactly what you should do in the larger political sphere. In the smaller sphere of personal relationships you can have a larger effect and should aim to do so. You can also consider things like moving to a more amenable place if you're young enough and it makes sense to do so.

As others said, it is basic premise of stoicism and its teachings on locus of control.

I find it especially useful to avoid certain manipulations - including those asking money from you, like EA. As a pragmatic observation, my internal spidey sense now lights up as spoon as I hear “we” as in “we humanity”. We should stop climate change, racism and if we are at it why not also hunger, all murder and pineaple pizza?

I think saying “not my problem” and even “fuck you, I wont do what you tell me” is perfectly fine stance for random ask by some stranger, especially online.

You wouldn’t save a drowning child if you were walking by one?

I'd save a central example of a drowning child if I was walking by one. There are circumstances under which I would not save a drowning child.

Would you?

Yes.

Given the number of "died trying to save drowning victim" cases (seriously, there are probably a dozen news articles in the US from this summer alone: [1] [2] [3]), I think it's prudent to point to the "reach, throw, row, don't go" advice from professionals that sometimes getting involved just creates another victim. By all means, do what you can -- reach with something, throw a float, call for help -- but actually entering the water can be very dangerous to even strong swimmers, especially if untrained.

I'm a pretty strong swimmer, but not a trained lifeguard or anything -- I'd keep my distance (although swim out there with a floaty if it seemed like it might help) from a drowning adult, but a literal drowning child I wouldn't hesitate to try to grab for any number of reasons. 'Sense of social duty' is one I guess, but not the main one -- have you ever played dunk/water wrestling with kids? You can literally throw them around while treading water, they are very unlikely to be able to drown you if you are actually a strong swimmer and a grown-ass man who outweighs them by 4x or whatever.

I think a lot of the times when people drown trying to save others is when they are not as good at swimming as they think they are, and underestimate the distance to the victim, currents etc -- also panic-swimming will tire you out pretty fast. So keep a cool head and do what you can -- it wouldn't be considered heroic behaviour if it weren't potentially dangerous. But I am not prepared to live with myself watching a kid drown from the shoreline.

This is good advice for the vast majority of people. Non-swimmers panic and will use the rescue swimmer as a climbing device in a large number of cases. From what I understand this is mindless, and they're filled with regret if they survive, but it's a thing that needs to be expected.

Should I save a drowning child in such a situation? Is it better for a child to die than to develop a strong social bond to a pedophile with all the risks that entails? Or should I save them and stoically endure the eventual "Stay away from my kid, creep!" or just plain "Thanks, now gtfo.", content in the knowledge that I did "the right thing" even while everyone thinks I just did it to get in the kid's pants? Why shouldn't I just say "not my problem" and keep walking?

If my kid was drowning, I couldn't care less if they were saved by a pedophile or Mother Teresa. They could give CPR while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock and I'd still rather my kid live than not.

They could give CPR while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock and I'd still rather my kid live than not.

Does this mean the calculus changes if they were giving CPR while slapping your child in the face with an erect cock?

It might, but I'd wager that just makes the kid wake up faster!

Sure, and once the euphoria of realizing your kid isn't going to die wears off, you'll be a good parent and start worrying about the next set of risks facing them--namely me. Hence the "Thanks, now gtfo." Helping kids almost always ends up being a net negative for my mental health, to which your response would almost certainly be "not my problem".

EDIT: Also, on a more humorous note, is it even physically possible to give CPR to a person "while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock"? The flexibility required seems inhuman to me...

Well, SMH only said a cock, not your cock...

Look, I'm unusually sympathetic to pedophiles, especially when Wokists try to extend that category to men who want to sleep with big breasted 16 year olds, which is almost universal in distribution and a fact of life for the majority of human existence. The only reason most men don't state they want to do that is fear of social disapproval.

I really see it as as the same kind of paraphilia as say, homosexuality, it's just that it's politically easier for one side to get what they want without the rest of society murdering them. If people want to consume artificial CP that doesn't hurt real kids, I literally don't give a fuck, especially since it likely has the opposite effect that critics claim of increasing the propensity to commit physical crimes to fulfill their lust.

If a pedophile saved my child, I'd be grateful, and assuming they didn't have a track record of arrests, not even care particularly about future interactions.

Now, you're a pedophile and I'm not, so I won't argue too hard about what kind of difficultly you face in being accepted by society. It's certainly much worse in the West, where there's no end of people slobbering at the mouth to put a bullet in your head for the crime of existing and not being able to change your brain, regardless of whether you act on it.

Still, I think you're wrong in that it's clear to me that almost every parent on their planet would rather have their child saved by a pedo/Hitler or even Pedo-Hitler rather than allowed to drown to death.

Also, on a more humorous note, is it even physically possible to give CPR to a person "while slapping them in the face with a flaccid cock"? The flexibility required seems inhuman to me...

If you're not too intent on the mouth to mouth rescue breaths, then you can do it while crouching above their head and facing their feet. Not recommended of course, and not in the ALS or BLS guidelines, but I'm sure someone can pull it off, and likely already has in a porno haha

I agree that almost every parent on the planet would prefer to have their child saved than not. I don't know that that preference implies I should try to save them though. I've never saved a kid's life before, but I have been an important figure in one's life and have seen first-hand how quickly people go from thankful to "never contact us again" when they find out, no matter how innocent your intentions or how careful you were to avoid even the hint of sexual behavior. That hurts, a lot, and I now find it hard to feel motivated to risk going through that again for the benefit of people who in all likelihood have nothing but disgust for me. The younger, less bitter me had the will to be somewhat altruistic, but that seems to be fading as I get older.

Saving a kid from drowning is not typically an ongoing relationship (unless the kid is very incident-prone I guess) which seems to be a big difference?

I believe the basic CPR training hasn't included rescue breaths in a while. Specifically they are nice to have, but continuing compressions is more useful in non-professional (read: watched training a year ago, no hands on experience) contexts.

I believe the basic CPR training hasn't included rescue breaths in a while. Specifically they are nice to have, but continuing compressions is more useful in non-professional (read: watched training a year ago, no hands on experience) contexts.

This recommendation is focused on adults as they are far more likely to have cardiac arrest due to a non-aphyxial cause. If you found an adult lying on the street, without a pulse it would be likely that they had taken a breath moments ago and still had oxygen in their blood stream and performing chest compressions can help circulate that oxygen. However, the majority of pediatric cardiac arrests have an asphyxial cause, therefore it is still recommended to do rescue breathes to introduce oxygen back into the bloodstream. In the case of drowning, where the person is likely to be hypoxic it would be recommended to do rescue breaths to introduce oxygen back into the bloodstream.

There is also the "team" version, where IIRC the "breath" person has a lot of time on his, um -- hands?

Healthier for you, worse for society. Obviously.

I don’t think it’s actually worse for society though. Hyper-focus on problems in itself creates all kinds of mental illnesses and creates a paralysis that can prevent the person from seeing a solution even if one exists.

On a social level, hyper focus on a problem can create the conditions that allow all kinds of tyrannical ideas to take hold. The entirety of 2020 would be pretty much an object lesson on this point. By simply getting everyone scared of illness, all kinds of things that are ordinarily unthinkable— locking people in their homes, closing businesses, requiring passes and proof of compliance with government mandates for participation in society. If someone would have proposed something like what we did in 2020 in any other situation, it would have been seen as police-state actions. There would have been wide-scale protests and disobedience. The same thing happened in 2001; just by making people afraid of terrorists you can build government watchlists, build spy programs, and hold people without trial. And history absolutely shows this, most tyrannical states start taking power by creating a crisis.

Yeah this is what my reply said in less words and less judgey. Well done.

Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?

Indeed, as others have pointed out, this mindset is at the heart of Stoïcism. It's also fairly close to Taoism.

What Stoïcism instructs is what to direct your will at: yourself. If you think that you have some influence over the DA, even just as a private citizen voting and writing letters to other people, then consider doing that. Or shape yourself into someone who would become a DA that would achieve the outcomes that you consider optimal. Make yourself into a better person and a better world will flow from that. The world is what it is; it can be improved if the people in it are improved, but the only one you can ultimately control is yourself. "But this DA is bad and is encouraging more bad people to do bad things!" Good is virtue, bad is vice. And virtue and vice can only be truly known from the inside. If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA? And your view that these charges should be brought up against these criminals, it's important that you observe your own thinking to understand if that's truly driven by wisdom, a virtue, or by a vice (in that case I think most would see wrath as a vice). Broadly: worry about yourself. Your soul, your actions, your reasoning.

And couching things in emotional terms, is a sure way to lessen your power of reasoning, to lessen the quality of your very soul. You see it everywhere; the originally well-meaning extremists that believe that because they see what they consider an injustice, it gives them licence to cause similar injury to others. Or single issue political/social crusaders who become blind to unintended consequences because they see one thing as "bad".

Ah, yes, I should have thought of stoicism.

If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA?

With this, did you mean to reinforce the idea that it's a waste of energy to fret about what the DA does? Because my interpretation is that it simply doesn't matter whether s/he's driven by what s/he thinks is virtue or vice. A crusader or jihadist could genuinely believe his actions are divine will to cleanse the world of evil, but why does that matter, at the end of the day? The average person is not intelligent or well-reasoned; attempting to understand how much of their actions is driven by virtue seems like a fool's errand.

Yes. It's not a waste of energy to understand his actions in the sense that if you have to make a decision on his actions, like voting for or against him in an election, you need to act wisely and justly. But it doesn't really matter to YOU whether it was driven by vice or vertue, I was simply pointing out that you can't really tell whether something outside of yourself is good or bad; you can't know all outcomes, and you can't know other people's internal thoughts. All you can really know is your own.

Now this is one of the parts where Stocism tends to lose some people, but Stoics, like most ancient virtue ethics philosophers, consider that ethics are simple and innate. When we're close to nature, we do not need to be taught that being rash, cowardly, mean and violent is bad, it "feels" innately bad. Likewise being wise, bold, nice, and calm feels good. The Crusader or the Jihadist who commit large scale murder are doing so because instead of focusing on themselves and their actions, they focus on the world, which they see as "evil". And trying to correct the world directly blinds you to your own actions. If instead of focussing on whether the world or other people are good or evil, he were to think "is my conduct virtuous?" as he's about to massacre an innocent, he would likely come to a different conclusion. You can commit an awful lot of evil when trying to improve the world, that you wouldn't be committing if you were trying to improve yourself.

I get your point, though I suppose in the end it comes down to blending all these systems and beliefs into some kind of approximate heuristics, since few decisions we make day to day entails whether we should massacre an innocent or not, and the moment you step away from the extreme example, things start looking mighty murky.

I think the stoic framework is the healthy one in most cases. There are things you can control: what you do, how you react, and what you say. The rest is simply outside of your control. You cannot make the DA press charges, so you don’t need to worry about the outcome here. The universe doesn’t owe you anything and what it does give you is best held lightly as it can be just as easily taken. Enjoy it, but don’t get attached to it.

The rest is simply outside of your control. You cannot make the DA press charges, so you don’t need to worry about the outcome here.

That seems like abdicating responsibility. DAs are often elected. A US citizen is capable of doing many things that would damage their re-election chances. You arguably have a duty to draw attention to their transgressions if you're upset.

You still can’t force him to do anything the best you can do is apply pressure or perhaps remove him. Doing something is better than doing nothing, but you still can’t force things to go your way.

True, but the Stoic take is that you engage in these actions as means to an end, which is making the world a better place, and not as an emotional catharsis without which you cannot achieve happiness and life satisfaction. The goal is that even if your efforts are frustrated and ultimately futile, you should be able to judge your own acts to be virtuous.

I mostly disagree. Almost everything in the world can be influenced to some degree or with some probability. If you dedicated the next year to it, you could probably shut down that puppy mill, or somehow make them a little less profitable.

Picking battles is absolutely necessary, and happens whether you choose it or not. I think that's a better approach than trying to divide the world into "under my control" vs "not".

Seconding this, and emphasizing that stoicism doesn't mean passivity; it means really truly internalizing that sometimes "You want it to be one way. But it's the other way".

You can try to change it, but you gotta accept reality first.

Do people who try to change things usually not accept that the things are in a state they don't like?

I've always seen it more as "accept that water runs downhill." Yes, you can pump water uphill, but there is a cost, and it must be done intentionally. Try as you might, you will never be able to get the universe into a state where "water runs uphill or downhill as needed at no cost" is a fundamental law.

People who successfully change things for the better tend to have internalized this. They understand that their actions have tradeoffs, opportunity costs, and that some things, like the past, are unchangeable. Others beat their heads against the brick wall that is reality.

That makes total sense, I agree that framing things in terms of tradeoffs is a huge upgrade from how most people think about what problems to go after. But that doesn't sound much like the stoicism I've heard about.

No, because you're switching connotations of acceptance from 'willing to tolerate' to something more like 'acknowledgement / recognition.' 'I acknowledge that this is bad, but I will not/ do not have to tolerate it' is not acceptance in the form that stoicism advocates.

I think you'd have to deny some very in your face facts to think that the world is immutable. Perhaps you are powerless (a state of affairs which can conceivably be changed) but obviously things do change and people change them. When immoral acts are committed it's because someone is committing them, when the justice system works properly it's because people are making sure it does. You're no less of an actor than the people who visibly make stuff happen.

I notice that all your examples don't affect you. Just to be clear, would you tell yourself to act the same if you were the victim of those things?

It's easy to point to greater suffering in quantity and magnitude in Ukraine or Niger, and I'm not sure what's the point of thinking about that either.

The point is to do better. It is to insist that those with the power to affect change do better. I understand that you personally cannot alter the course of events in Ukraine. But an ocean is a trillion drops of water, an avalanche is a trillion snowflakes, and likewise, the world gets better with each successful individual act of doing better.

I'll go one step further. A great many things would improve if people didn't try to insist on some "nature" equivalent of the just world hypothesis. Humans have remarkable ability to not only learn morality, but to implement it in their own lives. The fact that some have a predisposition towards doing unjust things is not a defense, because if your urges to act immorally are so strong, then you have forsaken some claim of being a wholly reasonable person who is due the rights privileges given by default.

I notice that all your examples don't affect you. Just to be clear, would you tell yourself to act the same if you were the victim of those things?

Of course not. My point was to focus exclusively on things that affect me, and ignore the rest. It's precisely because I'm not the victim of that carjacking that I posit here perhaps it's smart for me to be mindful about not losing any sleep over it. If criminality and victimhood are both natural, then it is preordained that someone will be carjacked and someone else will be the carjacker. My framework here simply says that I pledge to never be the carjacker (unless, I suppose, extraordinary circumstances demanded it, and I'd pay compensations or suffer the consequences after), and will focus my energy on not being carjacked (e.g., never leaving the key in the ignition while fueling, avoiding shady fuel stations, having someone on me for self-defense).

because if your urges to act immorally are so strong, then you have forsaken some claim of being a wholly reasonable person who is due the rights privileges given by default.

A good sentiment, but I think you're preaching to the choir here. We're here talking about this because we believe we are the good ones and lament that more people aren't better.

A good sentiment, but I think you're preaching to the choir here. We're here talking about this because we believe we are the good ones and lament that more people aren't better.

That was most definitely not me trying to preach to the choir. I see defenses of that sort quite often here.

Edit: feel free to take my observation with a grain of salt. I swear I've seen that stuff, but I can't find it, in part because I spend far less time on this site.

Can we get some examples for reference?

Goddammit, you just had to do the right thing and ask me to back up my claims, didn't you? Ultimately, I don't save that stuff and this realization was one of hindsight. I got nothing for ya, sorry. Will edit the post to reflect this.

heh, sorry. I'm asking to try to understand the argument better, not out of skepticism over whether they exist. Obviously links would be best, but I'm not Gatsaru either; I'd be happy with just your rough impressions.

That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement. Funnily enough the author of the article seems to be the disinformation Mary Poppins.

But why on Earth would «Russia» not wait for Ukraine fatigue to set in? I don't think some evidence like a document must be shown, it's just common sense and the burden of proof is on you. Pro-Z Russians I know are very explicitly banking on it, channelling Kremlin beliefs. And of course it's expected of them – the whole thing is revealed as senseless struggle the moment you accept that the US and by extension «the West» won't stop backing Ukraine. Which they won't of course: no matter how tired proles get, how many new current things they pivot to in the attention economy, they won't become pro-Russian (not with how Putin acts anyway; @Dean details a plausible rationale, but I think there's conscious reveling in depravity too, certain edgelording, Putin has an adolescent's sense of humor); and it will remain political suicide and betrayal of the premise of NATO to actually abandon Ukrainian cause.

The US, as a geopolitical entity, actually values the loyalty of all those peoples in Central Europe/Baltics who are (more than anyone else on the continent) directly interested in the suppression of Russian imperial agenda and aid Ukrainians as their fellow former subjects of the empire, as well as their current shield.
The US also cares directly about the diminution of Russia in the context of American grand strategy (where international economic isolation of China and denial of usable allies to China is the primary objective for the foreseeable future); victorious Russia is a substantially more valuable ally to China than one bogged down in trench warfare and suffering attacks on its capital, so it must not come to exist.

For these and other reasons, whatever fatique will be felt by the NATO camp, it won't be a big factor. But yes, Russians ignore these reasons and absolutely hope it will be, and this has been a consistent theme in the commentary for the whole duration of the war (except the first delusional week or so). This has been a common theme prior to the war, since 2014 at least – «Hohols will freeze to death without our gas» and so on (perfectly mirrored in that Gazprom middle finger to the EU); protracted resource throttling (or even just threatening it) in hopes of getting opposition to yield is a staple of Kremlin playbook, informed by the foundational belief that you can win by continuously imposing costs which translate into fatique and giving up. «These Gayropeans spoiled by their democracy are not tough, they can't endure remotely as much hardship [as our slaves]» is a very typical conviction both of authoritarians and of their powerless supporters and in Russia it has perhaps been developed into its ultimate form of a pervasive philosophical attitude to life. It's wrong about the other side, and it's mostly empty posturing with regard to one's own, these people aren't prepared for meaningful sacrifices, nor do they really care about the goal such as taking Ukraine, indeed most of them feel war fatique and would've given up if it were up them. But to the extent that they have something like strategy, all pro-war Russians from P. himself do the lowest Z conscript do pin their hopes on war fatigue in the West.

I’m not sure that it is sustainable. We’re spending billions a month on propping up the Ukrainian side. Given a lot of other needs at home, I don’t think you can keep doing that and still maintain power in a democracy. The public isn’t opposed to independence for Ukraine, but they’re also not nearly as engaged as they were a year ago. A year later I would expect even less interest. If some other crisis comes in, I would expect there’s going to be a formidable anti-war backlash.

whatever fatique will be felt by the NATO camp, it won't be a big factor.

Never say never. Trump has openly said he would blackmail Ukraine into surrendering, and he currently has a runaway chance to be the RNom. There's no guarantee that would actually happen if he became president again since Trump is a waffle and if the people surrounding him (e.g. Kushner) or cable news pundits are all against it then he could soften his approach. But he could also very much... just do what he's saying he will, and the modern US political system centralizes an overwhelming amount of military power in the chief executive, so dissenting Dems + Repubs in Congress would have little recourse.

A critical reason this war is going to be a long one is because the question of "which side benefits from a drawn out war of attrition" is very unsettled.

That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement.

I'm not sure what you'd consider 'evidence,' but it is consistent plausible end-state motivations for most Russian strategic efforts since last summer. After it became apparent that Russian conventional offensives would be generally ineffective and disproportionately costly even as Putin demonstrated that mobilization waves would be a resort rather than a primary means of maintaining offensive mobility, there were three general dynamics for Russia: to keep trying to attack irregardless, to try and escape the conflict, or to adopt a defensive posture to conserve power and extend the clock. Putin has progressively tried to axe any viable Russian withdrawal route by various means to limit the political viability of such (the annexation of unoccupied territory, blowing up dams), and redirected offensive capabilities away from conventional targets towards things like the attacks on civilian power grids, which is classic economic transition that had the effect of running up the bill for western support, i.e. trying to strain western electrical industrial support and increasing the economic costs if Europe wanted to rebuild Ukraine after a war to incentive a shorter war.

The spring offensive aside- and that was at least conceptually supposed to be a more limited offensive to get territory that was part of the initial nominal casus belli- Russia has generally adopted the defensive posture to extend the clock, even as it has tried to continue its usual sort of IO efforts to fan anti-war efforts or actors and encourage divisions in the western coalition backing Ukraine. I'd personally consider that 'waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in' a fair characterization, though it's a bit more proactive than that.

Of course, this is not 'evidence' as much as 'assessment,' based on things that are presumably open knowledge but not claiming any Russian internal document saying 'this is the goal,' a standard which would largely preclude evidence from being relevant.

Not sure how we would tell the difference between Russia hoping NATO will get tired and hoping that Ukraine will get tired -- the latter seems much more realistic. I'm pretty sure we will keep sending the Ukrainians bombs so long as they are prepared to keep shooting them at the Russians -- but at some point (one supposes) Ukrainians might tire of being blown to shit over the soil of various unimportant podunk farm towns where the action seems to be now taking place.

Selection of propaganda framings. Framing the conflict as being over unimportant podunk farm towns is the Russian-desired framing fit for westerners, not for Ukrainians, which is rather the point.

The Ukrainian support for the war is sky-high because the Ukrainians see this as an existential struggle that wouldn't end with a cease fire (because Russia could consolidate, regroup, and try yet another continuation war in what is already a series of continuation conflicts). If the Russians were trying to target Ukraine, they would focus on themes undermining this perception, and conceal, rather than amplify, narrative claims about how Ukraine was a fake country (that does not deserve to exist) and Nazis (for which total war and destruction is jusitfied) and properly russion (annexation). Anti-Ukrainian resolve IO would try to dissuade that Ukrainians in their power will be killed / kidnapped / tortured / moved as demographic pawns, and cast such allegations as ridiculous.

Instead, the state media and state-influenced media spheres practically revel in it, validating Ukrainian perceptions of Russian threat.

Framing the war as being a futile struggle over nothing important is a messaging theme for westerners providing Ukraine support. It is an entirely temporally-isolated narrative framing that focuses on ignoring what came before and what could come after, and stresses material value contrasts in the present tense (podunk farms vs billions in military/economic aid to continue fighting). This creates a maximally unfavorable framing for supporting the Ukrainians in terms of people providing things of value to them, which works in parallel with Russian efforts to use political proxies in Europe to act as 'peace activists' for pro-Russian settlements, signal boost or inflame opposition/dissident actors framing domestic complaints in terms of the war.

There were also the really unsubtle narrative campaigns regarding last year's energy cutoffs and Nord Stream Pipeline politics. Germany has long been the target of Russian information efforts. It failed, but not for lack of Russian trying.

Returning the previous post's point: at some point when beating their head against walls didn't work out, the Russians had to make a choice between cutting losses but also loosing gains, and playing for time in hopes they could end up keeping gains. They chose to play for time. The strategy to make that time turn to their favor is to change the conditions that enable the Ukrainians to resist against Russia's larger economic mass, which is to say the even larger Western economic mass. If Western mass can be disconected, then the conflict may go back to one Russia can 'win.'

Is it a probably stupid plan? Yes. But it's also very characteristic of Putin.

Selection of propaganda framings. Framing the conflict as being over unimportant podunk farm towns is the Russian-desired framing fit for westerners, not for Ukrainians, which is rather the point.

Who desires that framing seems to depend largely upon who's currently in possession of the podunk towns -- I certainly saw Bakhmut referred to this way in Western media as Russia was on the cusp of occupying it; ie. "Look how hard it has been for Russia to capture this one little town, they are so dumb/ineffectual/whatever". Now that Ukraine is making progress (?) on retaking it's bombed out husk it has suddenly been framed as a more important place. I have limited exposure to Russian/Ukrainian media, so IDK how it's framed to the people who are actually getting killed over it.

The Ukrainian support for the war is sky-high

I believe it -- just that it seems not-unreasonable to think that this might change at some point before NATO tires of spending single digit percentages of its military budget on having other people kill Russians for them? "Ukraine is little puppy, we are big bear" seems like a pretty easy sell for the Russian leadership?

Framing the war as being a futile struggle over nothing important is a messaging theme for westerners providing Ukraine support. It is an entirely temporally-isolated narrative framing that focuses on ignoring what came before and what could come after, and stresses material value contrasts in the present tense (podunk farms vs billions in military/economic aid to continue fighting). This creates a maximally unfavorable framing for supporting the Ukrainians in terms of people providing things of value to them, which works in parallel with Russian efforts to use political proxies in Europe to act as 'peace activists' for pro-Russian settlements, signal boost or inflame opposition/dissident actors framing domestic complaints in terms of the war.

None of this is working, at all, though? "Current Thing" support for weapons delivery/profile flags seems strong as ever -- and even if it weren't there would be a long ways to go before public opinion stopped the Pentagon from doing as they please, no?

If Western mass can be disconected, then the conflict may go back to one Russia can 'win.'

Is it a probably stupid plan? Yes. But it's also very characteristic of Putin.

I mean it's probably the only plan -- full retreat would be the end of Putin I should think.

Who desires that framing seems to depend largely upon who's currently in possession of the podunk towns -- I certainly saw Bakhmut referred to this way in Western media as Russia was on the cusp of occupying it; ie. "Look how hard it has been for Russia to capture this one little town, they are so dumb/ineffectual/whatever". Now that Ukraine is making progress (?) on retaking it's bombed out husk it has suddenly been framed as a more important place. I have limited exposure to Russian/Ukrainian media, so IDK how it's framed to the people who are actually getting killed over it.

You're confusing propaganda narrative for assessment of value.

Bakhmut was referred to as strategically insignificant by non-Russian analysts because it's capture was (correctly) analyzed as not going to allow Russia the sort of breakthrough or impact to Ukrainian offenses to meaningfully change the strategic posture in a way to facilitate more effective follow-on Russian operations. Early in the war, Bakhmut falling was a pre-requisite for the Russians having a pincer attack that threatened the entire Ukrainian position in the Donetsk, one of the key territories in Russia's nominal casus belli for the administrative boundaries of the Donetsk separatists they claimed to be fighting for. As a pincer at a theater level, it would have allowed the Russians to deny the pocket access to artillery, given localized air superiority, and greatly diminished the ability of the Ukrainians to defend, as we saw earlier in the summer elsewhere during the grinding artillery offensive. After Kharkiv, the Russians lost both the territory and the logistics hubs required for any sort of pincer, negating the potential for overlapping artillery to keep out the Ukrainian artillery, greatly limiting the effectiveness of aviation, and so on. Without the second pincer to weaken the Ukrainian defenses by denying them safe space for artillery in the 'pocket', the advance from Kherson became the same general prospects as the advance into Kherson, which was not only massively wasteful in manpower, but the political consequences ended up resulting in a mutiny. Analysts didn't know the later would happen, but they were completely correct about the former, hence why it was a fight for a city and not what was beyond because the city became it's own target regardless of anything else.

By contrast, referring to the current offensive as over (non-specific, temporally isolated, inherently insignificant) podunk farms ignores that the podunk farms are simply where a defensive line is that- if broken, would radically reshape the viability of follow-on operations in war-altering ways. Namely, that the southern offensive threatened to reach the black sea, or at least put it into artillery range, thus cutting off land-based resupply of Crimea. Russia was highly dependent on the Crimean bridge to move forces and supply the Crimean peninsula, a logistics lift which was throttled by the bridge attacks but somewhat mitigated by the land corridor. Compromising that land corridor forces the Russians to be far more dependent on a far more limited supply chain itself still vulnerable to disruption, and by limiting that supply chain would enabled the Ukrainians to have future more favorable operations against the Russians in those undersupplied areas (i.e. by going from the sea and then west, towards the peninsula's opening).

The Ukrainians don't/didn't care where particularly the southern lines were breached, but no matter where it was, it would be through podunk farms. Framing the offensive as over podunk farms, as opposed to being over what the podunk farms are in the way towards, is a propaganda framing, not an analysis of what the target.

The Ukrainian support for the war is sky-high

I believe it -- just that it seems not-unreasonable to think that this might change at some point before NATO tires of spending single digit percentages of its military budget on having other people kill Russians for them? "Ukraine is little puppy, we are big bear" seems like a pretty easy sell for the Russian leadership?

And yet, the Russians don't believe this (which I believe is correct), and are focusing their propaganda efforts at the west instead (which is reflected in the prevalence of themes and prioritization of efforts).

The question is not whether you think the Russians are doing the sensible thing. The war was not a sensible thing. The question is what the Russians are doing, and how we might know it.

Framing the war as being a futile struggle over nothing important is a messaging theme for westerners providing Ukraine support. It is an entirely temporally-isolated narrative framing that focuses on ignoring what came before and what could come after, and stresses material value contrasts in the present tense (podunk farms vs billions in military/economic aid to continue fighting). This creates a maximally unfavorable framing for supporting the Ukrainians in terms of people providing things of value to them, which works in parallel with Russian efforts to use political proxies in Europe to act as 'peace activists' for pro-Russian settlements, signal boost or inflame opposition/dissident actors framing domestic complaints in terms of the war.

None of this is working, at all, though?

'At all' is totalizing language that would be inherently wrong. There are anti-war / 'don't support the Ukrainians' movements, and there have been diplomatic flareups between the western coalition that Russia has signal-boosted and amplified.

It is not working enough at the moment, but that's why the Russians are playing for time in Ukraine while trying to shape the western information sphere via propaganda over time.

"Current Thing" support for weapons delivery/profile flags seems strong as ever -- and even if it weren't there would be a long ways to go before public opinion stopped the Pentagon from doing as they please, no?

Hence why they are strategically playing to the defensive and buying time and going after the long-term viability of the Ukrainian government (which would collapse without Western aid).

The Russian wish-fantasy-strategy is that someone like Donald Trump comes into power on a wave of discontent (that the Russians help amplify), and once in power overrules the military / fundamentally breaks the alliance / does things that Russia would like.

It doesn't matter that even Donald Trump didn't do that when in office, that's just what the Russian hail mary is, and Putin is well into hail-mary territory.

I mean it's probably the only plan -- full retreat would be the end of Putin I should think.

Putin still has full control of the internal security forces, and the ability to shoot dissenters. He'll be paranoid and miserable, but it's not like he'll lose an election. Wagner's mutiny was worse for showing how little the military was able/willing to stop it, not for it's (in)ability to take over Moscow or a lack of government control of the internal security services. Moscow would have been bloody and embarrasing, but not the end of Putin for the same reason that the war itself isn't: Putin has made all his potential successors complicit, so that they would share his fate, so they have an interest in avoiding it.

That article claimed Russia was openly waiting for Ukraine fatigue to set in but never provided any evidence to back this statement.

This is basically all arguments about Russian collusion/subversion in a nutshell.

Nothing to see here--it's all part of nature. Understand how it works, make sure you're not the mouse/fly/blueberry, and move on happily with your own life.

This ideology may work decently for you individually, although I think it takes a heroic individual to truly accept that brutal state of affairs.

Over time though, and on a societal level, this type of thinking will inevitably descend back into the might-makes-right, strong eat the weak world that we rose from. During the Axial revolution back around the time of Socrates, men realized that they could make themselves better. That there was a different way to live than simply accepting Nature as red in tooth and claw - we could master nature. But more importantly, we could master ourselves.

All the beauty and ease your life is filled with has been delivered to you from generations of your ancestors that rejected this naturalistic worldview in order to build a better future for their descendants. You can spit on their sacrifices and just focus on getting yours, man, but I reject your worldview as fundamentally selfish, and wrong.

inevitably descend back into the might-makes-right, strong eat the weak world that we rose from

Maybe I exaggerate slightly, but aren't we functionally there? In what realm is might not right and strong not eating the weak?

You can spit on their sacrifices and just focus on getting yours

This sounds good but I think is facile. The beauty of capitalism is that, barring certain tragedy of the commons exceptions, the system allows society to flourish while people simply focus on getting "theirs".

I think it’s really more or less human nature that when push comes to shove, it’s still about the same laws of power and control that it always was. We’ve repainted the castles pink and lavender, we’ve given our serfs the veneer of control over things but if you’re sitting in a powerful position, you’re doing things pretty much the way we always did. And for those at the bottom, again life isn’t that much better outside of the sheer material comforts. If you’re in a low position on the social hierarchy, your life is still dictated to you. Your boss can choose your dress, your hours, and force you to say things you don’t want to. Those in the middle also have to be careful to be properly orthodox and to protect their positions in the social hierarchy. This is how human societies work and always have worked.

I’ve never seen much reason to pretend otherwise. The elite’s favorite game is the game of thrones, and when it comes to that point, you don’t have any say.

I hate the world my ancestors have made. I hate the shiny metal prison that uses drugs and manipulative interactive propaganda to try and convince people they're happier or have more agency than a medieval serf.

I yearn for brutality and its reality. I yearn for the truth of man's condition in this Chtonic age of lies.

But most of all I despise those that, as you do, hide their cowardly quest for mere comfort behind a communal social standard that only exists to leech on their betters with impunity.

If rejecting this giant daycare is egoism then egoism is a moral duty.

Well at least you're honest. If you want to go back to an apocalyptic world of brutal violence, Girardian scapegoating, and evil then you're welcome to it I suppose. You and the rest who follow you into hell will reap what you sow. I'd argue that you have no idea what you're in for, but given the fact that you despise me, I doubt you'll listen.

I just hope those of us against that dark vision can stop you before you and your cohort destroy the world.

I just hope those of us against that dark vision can stop you before you and your cohort destroy the world.

The world deserves to be destroyed. I don't aim to do it myself though, it's doing fine on its own. All I want is to survive and inherit the Earth.

I yearn for brutality and its reality.

rejecting this giant daycare

Feel free to travel to Somalia, Syria or Ukraine with brutality available to experience. Personally I am entirely not looking for more brutality in my life, thank you very much.

or have more agency than a medieval serf

They have. (for "happier" I do not really have enough knowledge to answer, but I also expect that)

Claiming that typical people nowadays have less agency than medieval serf is a quite wild claim. What kind of serfdom you compare to modern life?

I mean I've been to places like that. It is refreshing in a way, but you don't really get the proper experience as a tourist.

Plus none of that is needed, I can just go to my cabin in the woods.

But all my personal tribulations make your quest for comfort that has sacrificed freedom and humanity no less evil, of course.

Claiming that typical people nowadays have less agency than medieval serf is a quite wild claim.

How many years of manual labor do you need to buy a dwelling for you and your family? How much free time do you have per day? Per year? How much control do other humans have on the way you live your daily life? How many hours do you have away from anybody? How much do you pay in taxes? Can you be conscripted in an army against your will?

I don't find it wild at all personally once you actually look at what is going on instead of the stories people tell about what is going on.

But of course the only answer when we start to look at the grim reality of modern man is to clutch at the true purpose: comfort. Oh but wouldn't you just get sick and die, wouldn't it all be very hard work? Yes, but at least you would have lived a human life and not that of a machine.

I'm not stopping you from retiring to your cabin in the woods where you can bask in the absence of civilization all you want, while you don't seem to be satisfied unless everyone is plunged there along with you. I find your way far more imposing on freedom.

Unfortunately if you did practice what you preach you wouldn't be able to prove it because you wouldn't have network.

I find your way far more imposing on freedom.

Somehow, though I've found a lot of red tape to constrain me to live away from civilization, I fail to see the coercion I have ever generated.

Must be of the invisible sort that only exists to grasp at when one doesn't want to consider alternatives to their position.

You sound like the people who call out socialists for using phones made by capitalism or call out Christians for not being socialists like they imagine Jesus was. Have you considered that people can have belief systems that aren't constrained by the principes you yourself hold?

Cop-out. Is a communist blameless because right until his party took power, he had not coerced anybody?

This is a nonsense question, communists do not believe coercion is immoral.

But I fail to see how this is relevant to my position. I'm merely exiting from society. Are you saying I deserve blame because I intend to create a society you disapprove of once this one is done for?

Am I, the individual, unfairly restricting the will of the State by having thoughts and desires that go against its will? Is mere dissent a moral crime? Well tough shit, I'm not a fascist.

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How many years of manual labor do you need to buy a dwelling for you and your family? How much free time do you have per day? Per year? How much control do other humans have on the way you live your daily life? How many hours do you have away from anybody? How much do you pay in taxes? Can you be conscripted in an army against your will?

How many times have you had to fight for your life against an angry mob? A wild animal?

How many times have you had to face starvation, or thirst, or truly look the spectre of death in the face?

When in your life have you had to sit back while a corrupt noble comes in and rapes your wife and daughter?

You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.

You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.

More light, less heat, please.

How many times have you had to fight for your life against an angry mob? A wild animal?

I did once run from a mob and had my share of wild animal encounters by now. I also got pepper sprayed and robbed at knifepoint by lowlives some years ago. Turns out cities are much more dangerous than the countryside in my experience, especially if like me you are armed.

If anything this is how I ended up believing what I believe.

How many times have you had to face starvation, or thirst, or truly look the spectre of death in the face?

I've been poor, but it is legitimately impossible to starve in the modern world if you're not mentally ill. I did almost freeze to death once and I think that one counts.

When in your life have you had to sit back while a corrupt noble comes in and rapes your wife and daughter?

I'm not a modern day German, so never. And I never will.

You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.

I fully understand that my beliefs are outside of what you deem acceptable, but it's fine, I also think yours are. The difference is that I actually have reasons for my belief that don't boil down to increasing my comfort at any cost.

My reasons boil down to the fact that I think violence is wrong, and I believe in the Christian ideal of suppressing our urge for violence. Fighting for a future where humanity can be something better.

Yeah I don't think upholding Christian ideals is the route you want to take in arguing for transhumanism -- it's extreme hubris and rejection of God rolled into one (either of which tends to be rapidly fatal in the OT, and non-negotiable bars to salvation in the NT), almost inherently and certainly in practice. "Another bite at The Apple", if you will.

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Interesting. I don't really see Christianity as incompatible with my goals or even in large disagreement with my complaints about modernity.

In fact I don't disagree at all that man is a beast that has to be tamed and that violence must be correctly contained to appropriate settings. Do not mistake me for a savage. The quest for a more brutal truth is not the quest for slavery to the passions.

If anything my complains are fully translatable to Christian theology. The modern world is a tower of Babel, and this aim you speak of to make humanity better is the scourge of hubris. And is destined to ignominious failure. Man is as he has been made and he will remain so until judgement. Salvation is not to be attained by making ourselves perfect but by seeking redemption in Christ.

Besides, the Christian ideal as I understood it has never been to completely renounce violence, but to tame our nature to prevent us from using it unwisely. Jesus himself had to right some wrongs by the sword and I've seen many scholars insist that his message is not one of weakness but of properly restrained strength. Blessed is the soldier who keeps his weapon sheathed and is patient in dealing with others rather than use anger, even though he very well could overpower others and get his way. Or as the mistranslation calls him, the meek.

How many times have you had to fight for your life against an angry mob? When in your life have you had to sit back while a corrupt noble comes in and rapes your wife and daughter?

I don't think these happened all that often.

A wild animal? How many times have you had to face starvation, or thirst, or truly look the spectre of death in the face?

I think the lack of these is precisely what he's lamenting.

You are so deluded it would be comical if your ideologies weren't so dangerous.

The feeling's mutual.

How many years of manual labor do you need to buy a dwelling for you and your family?

Dwelling of quality matching one that serf had? Zero, better is available for free and abandoned. I prefer to pay for superior standard.

How much free time do you have per day? Per year?

Much more than serfs. Much much more than median, but that is also higher than what serfs had.

How much control do other humans have on the way you live your daily life?

For start, I am allowed to leave settlement where I was born. I guess you can find axis on which serfs had more freedom but overall this claim seems extremely shaky.

Can you be more specific? Freedom of selecting how I will work, freedom of movement are fairly important to me and would not switch to serfdom unless forced.

Can you be conscripted in an army against your will?

Are you under impression that serfs could not be? And I am vastly less likely to die in war than serf and vastly less likely to be conscripted. And in case of conscription I am vastly more likely to survive.

How much do you pay in taxes?

Less than serfs, unless you mean some nonsense metrics like absolute tax value. Or you do not count mandatory work as taxes.

On any meaningful metric like tax burden I pay less.

How many hours do you have away from anybody?

As much as I want, unlike serfs (though if anything I would focus on family/meaningful connections with others - that seems much better target if you want to go "we are in worse situation than serfs")

better is available for free and abandoned

You're not allowed to live in shantytowns and shacks, you're not even allowed to build them, I know men who tried, eventually the constabulary comes to kick you out of your illegal out of code dwelling and force you to pay into the racket.

Best I've seen is people who convert existing farming structures, and that runs you at least some years of labor to buy the land.

Much more than serfs. Much much more than median, but that is also higher than what serfs had.

You'll have to forgive me, I don't see our 80 days a year of mandated holy rest from here.

Can you be more specific?

I'm not talking about freedom to choose what you do for a living, the modern world clearly requires that flexibility and thus give you much larger on paper freedom there. I'm talking about the amount of scrutiny you get doing this work, hence why I follow up with asking how long of a time you spend away from anybody's gaze. But that one's not really a contest, the serf doesn't have a black rectangle in his pocket that tells everybody where he is and allows them to summon him at all times.

Are you under impression that serfs could not be?

Outside of perpetually insane places, such as Russia, conscription has been viewed as abominable throughout the middle ages and a clear act of tyranny. It took a literal revolutionary government beset by ennemies on all sides to change that norm in France. And the change of that norm led to the Napoleonic era and the invention of total war.

People always seem surprised when they learn about this, but ask any medieval historian and they'll tell you just this.

unless you mean some nonsense metrics like absolute tax value

I don't think I need to say anything here really.

lets take simple one...

You'll have to forgive me, I don't see our 80 days a year of mandated holy rest from here.

For start, weekends alone give you 105 free days in 2023. Add to that public holidays, paid holidays (last one may not apply in USA, I guess - but I expect that you can still take unpaid time off).

Also, [citation needed] for that 80 days.

Also, you seem to narrow down from serfdom in general to some specific variety. Can you be more specific? Again, what kind of serfdom you compare to modern life?

How much do you pay in taxes?

unless you mean some nonsense metrics like absolute tax value

I don't think I need to say anything here really.

(all numbers are for comparison purposes only)

If I earn 6 000, got taxed 3 000 while serf would have total income 600 and got taxed 500 then my tax burden is lesser. Despite that I pay 3000 and serf 500.

If I earn 6 000, 4 000 going to taxes then burden may be still lesser than earning 600 and getting taxed 350.

Obviously this comparisons are fraught with problems given that vast majority of tax burden for serfs was mandatory labor, which could be treated also as payment for land (and partially was). And many restrictions both past in modern are effectively taxes.

Also, [citation needed] for that 80 days.

Medieval historian friend of mine gave me that particular figure, Of course it's more complicated than that, but if anything it's a lower bound you can work out out of Urban VIII's limitation of non sunday days of obligation to 36 in the 17th century. Bishops could institute at many new feasts for their dioceses as they wanted before then and you'll find larger lists if you look for them.

But really what we're arguing about is the total amount of work people put in and how comparable it is to the modern work week, which is unsurprisingly a debated topic. Lower estimates, such as what you'll find in Schor's heavily quoted book are around 150, higher estimates are about 300. But fittingly for this thread since Schor's book became popular it's become a culture war topic that people use to push various labor related agendas so I'm disinclined to believe any American view on the matter.

I'm mostly going off Pierre Goubert's account which is definitely on the lower side of that debate, but I don't have those books around me to give you a proper figure from him.

you seem to narrow down from serfdom in general to some specific variety.

I'm really only talking about what I know and have been taught about, which is its form in Anglo-French civilization.

If I earn 6 000, got taxed 3 000 while serf would have total income 600 and got taxed 500 then my tax burden is lesser. Despite that I pay 3000 and serf 500.

Oh I see what you mean.

I think a better measure is effective total tax rate. Though as you say that's more difficult to measure because there were so many different entities at the time and most of it was in kind.

We do have extensive scholarly work on that in my country because tax has such a storied history in France and was one of the specifically claimed reasons for the French Revolution.

The way the historians measure it, since it is mostly composed of indirect taxes, is to measure the amount of days worked a year.

François Hincker in his book on this topic Les Français devant l'impôt sous l'Ancien Régime, which I eventually read because it was quoted on one of my exams, gives us a pretty stunning figure that stayed with me:

The 25 million inhabitants of [Ancien Régime] France have to pay 470 millions in tax, that is to say between 18 or 19 livre each. At that time the monthly salary of a mason in Paris is at a little less than a livre. So a middling salaryman would work about seven days to pay tailles, capitation and vingtièmes, about two to pay gabelle and a little more than nine to pay other indirect taxes

18 days total, which can be compared to say, France's current mean total tax rate of 56.9% which with the equivalent average salary computes to 208 days yearly to pay taxes.

Now I'm not saying the comparison holds for every place in Europe at that time, but when De Jouvenel and others argue that the revolution actually worsened the tax burden for everyone including myself, I'm inclined to believe them.

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With the release of the recent Barbie movie, the old gender debates on the internet have been reignited. (Admittedly, I haven't watched it yet, might pen down my thoughts once I do.)

I recently encountered another article by a heterosexual, middle-class woman discussing how we can assist young men in discovering their masculinity. The piece, confidently titled map out of the wilderness, repeats the narrative tropes that countless similar works in journalism tend to focus on.

Does it argue that men are disoriented because women are no longer subservient? Indeed. Does it accuse men of falling for 'destructive' ideologues such as Jordan Peterson and Bronze Age Pervert whose political ideologies aren't personally favored? Yes. Does it claim men are discontent because women wish for them to behave more femininely? Absolutely. Does it state there's a lack of 'positive masculinity?' Oh, for sure.

To credit the writer, Christine Emba, she does highlight some of the more sinister issues that venture slightly beyond the bounds of conventional discourse. She openly criticizes feminists and women in general for refusing to assist men, citing an instance where Obama was chastised for attempting to help boys, and thousands of women denounced him in protest.

What prompted me to respond to this article was a moment of blatant self-awareness by the author, who admits when reproached by a man that she doesn't want to be intimate with men who heed her advice (emphasis mine):

Where I think this conversation has come off the tracks is where being a man is essentially trying to ignore all masculinity and act more like a woman. And even some women who say that — they don’t want to have sex with those guys. They may believe they’re right, and think it’s a good narrative, but they don’t want to partner with them.

I, a heterosexual woman, cringed in recognition.

Yes, dear writer, you recoiled in acknowledgment. If you, a talking head opining on this topic, felt this way, consider the reaction of those numerous women with lesser self-awareness when they encounter these feeble, effeminate men.

However, all the discussions around gender roles, sexual relations, power dynamics, and 'incels' are missing the real issue. They're distractions, veils obscuring the core problem.


At the risk of being cliche, I'll reference Nietzsche's most well-known line:

God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.

Why has this single paragraph echoed throughout recent centuries as one of the deepest and most frequently reiterated explanations of modernity's moral crisis? Obviously, Nietzsche, a self-proclaimed atheist, doesn't imply we've executed deicide in the literal sense. What we've done is obliterated any transcendent reason for existence. There is no apparent reason why young men should exhibit concern for their neighbors, work towards self-improvement, curtail their desires, or even make an effort to contribute to society.

For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?

Regardless of the religion you choose, these systems provided us with a motive beyond primal, materialistic pleasures to care. They provided us with an aim to pursue. Most importantly, they offered us a social framework within which we could strive collectively with others and receive commendation for our benevolent deeds.

Nietzsche's suggested solution is that the New Men must 'become deities' to be worthy of God's murder. Regrettably, as we've found out, not everyone can ascend to godhood. Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?

How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.


Returning to Ms. Emba's proposed solution, she states that men need to experience masculinity by:

by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating.

This, she asserts, is 'Constructive Masculinity.' Let's look past the glaring issue that it's a woman attempting to define what masculinity should be - the question remains: why?

Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist. And not a poor, weak reason like 'following your dreams' or 'getting money' or 'being a good person.' Men need something to strive for, something worth dying for, something that they can use to shield themselves from the terror of the void.

Of course this problem is applicable to far more people than just young Western males. This lack of meaning, lack of purpose, is at the core of modernity's societal problems. It waits like a tiger in the shadows, seizing us in our moments and weakness and pulling us into a black pit of despair, nihilism. Emptiness.

When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?

How will you cleanse your hands of blood?

Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist. And not a poor, weak reason like 'following your dreams' or 'getting money' or 'being a good person.' Men need something to strive for, something worth dying for, something that they can use to shield themselves from the terror of the void.

Speak for yourself big man, the absolute overwhelming majority of men throughout history have spent their lives just living day to day until the day they died, with no greater ambitions than maybe following the script that their society laid out for them. Most men throughout history haven't been great adventurers, warriors, explores or philosophers, they were peasant farmers. If there was anything that could be described as "something to strive for, something worth dying for" it would be their families, it would be doing exactly what the woman in this article proposes as a solution.

the question remains: why?

For a young man in a contemporary world that is entirely individual-centric, what is the appeal of any altruistic act?

I can't help but get the feeling of a stroppy 12 year old asking why they should do something their parents have asked them to do that they don't want to.

The answer is because it is almost certainly in your own best interest. The average human is a social creature and actually tend to derive satisfaction from helping other people. For most a life of mindless hedonism is like a life spent eating nothing but sweets, it sounds like a good idea at the start, but eventually it rots you from the inside out. A life spent broadly in pursuit of making a better life for yourself and your community is a safer bet if you're looking for fulfillment. It's not for everyone, but if you're the kind who needs to be lead by the hand to your purpose in life, it's probably your best shot.

How will you cleanse your hands of blood?

I've found that water tends to do the job fine, does so even better if you've got a little soap, so I suppose if I'm dying near some water I could use that if I've got the energy and inclination.

Articles like this infuriate me. I am a pretty mellow individual and it usually takes a lot to get me riled up, but feminist articles, particular those about "masculinity" (God I hate that word and how it's used to pathologise men) I just find so rage-inducing.

Like all feminist piece about masculinity, it's doomed to fail because they cannot contradict the core beliefs and assumptions of feminist theory, which is a major, if not core contributor to the problem the article is trying to address in the first place.

When the author talks about the protector and provider role, and fatherhood being the base for developing a new positive "masculinity", my immediate response is "just what the fuck do they think they think masculinity has been about for millennia?" The feminist answer of course, is that masculinity has historically and currently been about oppressing women. "Hegemonic" masculinity and related terms. Before feminists turned "patriarch" into a dirty word, it actually reflected the reality that historically family life has always formed a key part of male identity, and it wasn't oppressive!

Of course, the author can in no way put any responsibility on to women for the social breakdown - and if they do it admit it, it's a good thing! In fact the article tacitly admits to this by singing the praises of the working woman, but the solution is never an adjustment on the part of women, oh no no no, the solution is always that men have to do more, "be better", and remake themselves into the New Soviet Feminist Man if necessary. How can you expect to build or maintain a masculinity around fatherhood and family when feminism has spend the last 60 years demolishing the family and cheering on its demise? How can you expect men to put family and fatherhood first when women clearly aren't putting family and motherhood first. Someone reneged on the social arrangements around family, and it wasn't men. But apparently men are expected to build a new "masculinity" to try and plug the gaps that weren't created by them.

The end of the article had me rolling my eyes incredibly hard.

It is harder to be a man today, and in many ways, that is a good thing: Finally, the freer sex is being held to a higher standard.

Yeah, because men totally haven't been held to high standards in the past and have been "free" to do whatever they want throughout history. I'm not sure how we the readers are meant to square the circle with the claim that men are protectors and providers but are also "free".

The old script for masculinity might be on its way out. It’s time we replaced it with something better.

"Hey men, you know how masculinity has traditionally been built on men being protectors and providers? Well we feminists decided that actually didn't happen and you were all oppressive bastards who have to pay for the sins of your ancestors. But we now going to give you the opportunity to build a new "positive" masculinity that built upon being protectors and providers in a feminist friendly way! What does feminist friendly way mean? Well, it's kind of the same as before but this time women are under no obligation to reciprocate in any way! Hope you join us with building something better!"

There's something so insidiously evil about selling the cause of the problem as the solution. If only we had more feminism and men embraced it the problem will be solved. True feminism has never been tried! Gotta keep digging ourselves in that hole I guess.

I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.

What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.

My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.

Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less.

Exactly. And this is why you have TRP and Andrew Tate's of the world. "Accept less and be, ya know, sorta happier maybe?" is the worst sales pitch of all time. Pop Culture feminism right now itself charges hard into the opposite direction; "girlboss", "lean in", "yass queen slay" (jeez, it hurt typing that last one).

In a hyper individualized society, "accepting less" is capitulation and fundamental surrender. Interestingly enough, I think you're seeing that with the > 50% of sexless, directionless men and the (literal) flavor-of-the-week "#lazygirl" meme. In a pro-social society with an clear emphasis on family, "accept less" is transformed into "team up with someone else for the long haul and do better than you could on your own." This also benefits from the fact that it's true for at least 80% of the population - post industrialized society or not. The mistake of 3rd wave+ feminism - and I do think it was a mistake, not a deliberate conspiratorial lie - was equating all of male history to the history of top 20% of males and then advocating for individual female choices that aligned to that model of human behavior.

Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.

What social cues and reinforcement loops exist today that encourage this over "get money, get laid"? What's more, it takes two to tango; what place does "derive meaning for raising children" have in popular culture for young women today?

Finally, the power imbalance between a man and the state has never been higher. I can derive meaning from raising my family, but I also have to live in constant fear that a judge can order, without me being present or informed, that I not be allowed to go to my house for at least two weeks, with a high probability I am going to have a challenge to my custody rights. When a man can have his family taken away at any moment by the bureaucratic machine of the state (based on "antiquated" deference to the fragility of a woman, right?) then investing my sense of transcendental meaning into the family seems high risk.

You bring up a good point about the convergence of earnings in a post-industrial society where physical strength means far, far less. I happen to think that's a very good thing. What we've failed to reconcile, however, is how the state has both (a) failed to evolve to account for this and (b) has over-evolved to take the place of provider - often with horrible real consequences for those in specifically aims to support

Emba places the family at the center of her "new" definition of masculinity. But, I would argue, there's been a massive assault on the family unit since the 1960s that has made the goal of family formation high risk and unlikely for men of all income levels. "Please base your own conception of masculinity on an institution that is actively under assault." Hmmm, I'm no Trojan, but I think I see a horse.

Why would you assume that because men have some degree of power that necessarily means men would abuse that power against women? Becauss that seems to be what you're implying You're assuming an antagonistic relationship between men and women is the natural state of affairs, which I disagree with. Masculinity on a mass societial level is necessarily pro-social, almost by definiton, or else there wouldn't be a society in the first place.

Additonally, you gloss over the immense social power women have and have always had, and the importance of the female role and how much men (society as a whole) relies on it (relies on it, not unilaterally imposes it). Men are dependent on women as much as women are dependent on men.

Additionally, you gloss over the immense social power women have and have always had, and the importance of the female role and how much men (society as a whole) relies on it (relies on it, not unilaterally imposes it). Men are dependent on women as much as women are dependent on men.

Samuel Johnson provides a pithy (as you’d expect from him) expression of this, even in a time far more patriarchical than our own:

Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little.

Additionally, going back even further, into the medieval era, there is the famous story of Aristotle and Phyllis, intended to show that no matter how noble one’s standing or intelligent one’s philosophy, he can still be brought to his knees by a woman.

(And of course, even further back than that, in the Iliad, we see Helen’s face launching a thousand ships.)

Stories like this are useful, because they dispel the pop-feminist myth that men under patriarchy oppressed women simply because they wanted to maximize their own benefits and minimize those of women. Rather, if anything, it was often viewed as lessening the power differential between men and women, a sort of affirmative action, if you will. Of course, the extent to which these stories were merely post-hoc rationalizations for pre-existing social structures can be debated. But they do serve as acknowledgement of what everyone intuitively knows: that women possess immense social power, just as men possess immense physical power. Moreover, they demonstrate that participants in patriarchy were conscious of this.

Quite frankly, the "man strong and powerful, man subjugate women who are dependent on him" perspective is an incredibly reductive conceptualisation of traditional gender relations which I unfortunately see bandied around ad nauseam. You can't just hold everything else to be the same “well ceteris paribus men are stronger” and extrapolate the entirety of gender relations from a single principle.

There are major sources of social power women possess, informed partially by people's preferences towards protecting women and a general women-are-wonderful effect. For example, there's the Moral Machine Experiment where a preference for protecting women was found in almost all countries, even many "patriarchal" ones. The result of unwillingness to harm women compared to men has been replicated in many, many different studies. And it holds when studied not only in a questionnaire context wherein people are merely quizzed about it, but also in experimental, real-world contexts. People are less likely to hurt women for personal gain, drivers leave more space for a cyclist who looks female, people are more willing to label male violence against women as a crime than the reverse even after controlling for perceptions of injury, and so on. As to the women-are-wonderful effect where people perceive women more positively, that too has been confirmed and replicated in multiple studies.

The rallying cry of feminists with regards to relationships in the past is always the legal doctrine of coverture. "Women weren't allowed to own property or enter into contracts!" Actually, they were, if they were single. Marriage changed the legal status of women from feme sole into feme covert, and sure, a feme covert could not own property (her property, goods and earnings belonged to her husband) and a feme covert could also not enter into contracts in their own name. This is technically true, but it is also a misleading half-truth. This analysis leaves several important things out, namely the male responsibility that stemmed from marriage. Husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all debts. If the family needed to buy goods on credit or otherwise take on debt, well, the husband contracts for the family, so inevitably, the debt is under his name, and the responsibility for paying it falls only on him. Remember, failure to pay that debt could result in imprisonment. These were some of the risks and costs that the husband took on under coverture.

Furthermore, if a wife was not already being adequately provided with her necessaries by her husband, she could buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency). She was basically given the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. Husbands had some recourse if the wife was spending way more than she needed by telling traders not to deal with her in the future, and sometimes cases were brought where husbands were not held liable for the debts, but IIRC in such cases it was not the wife who got in trouble - it was the trader who bore the loss. Furthermore, in reality some wives actually seem to have gotten their husbands in legal trouble through overspending. As I said, under coverture, husbands were the only ones who could be thrown in jail for debt, and this was a significant risk for men in the marital position.

To build on this, here's an interesting statistic: In the eighteenth century, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why. Yes, women had to trade something for protection and provision (something I do not view as unreasonable, considering the costs that undertaking the role of provision and protection placed on men - it is only fair that there be reciprocity). And sure, it was a bit of a restrictive marital contract for women who wanted to take on more of an active role even if that meant they had to assume risk they would otherwise be shielded from. But it wasn't only restrictive for women. Men did not get to say "Hey, I want my wife to manage all the marital finances if that means she takes on all the risk of default and also assumes responsibility for supporting me". Men did not simply get to abandon their role because it didn't suit them.

And in practice, sex roles were not nearly as strictly prescribed as coverture stated. Women could and did participate in public sphere work, did a lot of purchasing for the family, managed the household property, and exercised a large amount of agency over the household economy generally speaking. When the family defaulted, men went to debtors' prison, but their families often followed them into these debtors' prisons. Both sides' responsibilities and rights were shared to a greater degree in practice than was stipulated in law, and ultimately the idea that women lived in some state of subjugation is a myth.

And moving away from the strict topic of relationships, the idea - that because men hold positions of formal power, society will favour men - is called into question when you look at multiple sources of evidence. Men do not act as a collective male "us" against a collective female "them". A study examining the raw and adjusted gender gaps in defendant pleas, jury convictions, and judge sentences from 1715 to 1913 at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London found that women were consistently treated more leniently - they were less likely to be subjected to the most severe form of punishment, even controlling for observable case characteristics. One of the posited reasons for this was that: "Given that males were deemed responsible for the welfare of females (their wives) in the home, it certainly seems feasible that they carried this duty over to the courtroom. ... [O]ne can think of judges and jurors as being less likely to convict females because of their positive taste/preference for protecting them."

The male:female suicide rates in the past also seem to contradict the idea that the system back then favoured men's preferences over women. In England and Wales the suicide rate was much, much greater for males than it was for females in the nineteenth century. Males committed suicide 3 to 4 times as often as females. According to this article: "The male rate was consistently higher than the female rate over the entire time period although the male to female (sex) ratio rose from 3.3 in 1861 to 4.0 in 1886 and 1906 and subsequently declined steadily to its lowest level (1.5) in 1966 before increasing again". This was similarly true in places like Switzerland. This article notes that "At the end of the 19th century, the suicide sex ratio (female-male ratio) in Switzerland was 1:6. 100 years later the sex ratio has reduced to about 1:2.5." Men must be the only historically "privileged" group who historically did more labour, who historically were given longer sentences for the same crimes, and who were historically far more likely to commit suicide compared to their supposedly "oppressed" counterparts.

Another note on historical female power: The social/moral power allotted to women seems to be pretty immense - the White Feather Girls in WW1 handed out white feathers to men in civilian clothes, marking them out as cowards if they did not enlist, and after that recruitment increased significantly - volunteering surged by a third during the 10 days after the first mention of the White Feather Girls in the news. Those young women who struck men at the very heart of their masculine identities - bestowing them a feather telling them "If you don't go off to be maimed or die, you are no longer a man in the eyes of some brassy chit you've never even met before and will probably never see again" - were exercising a classic female form of social power. And many men went because women's censure had the power to drive them straight into the teeth of death. Here is a recounting of one such case.

I think all of these things are enough to lead one to at least question the idea of historical female oppression. This seems to have just become a point of dogma, it aligns with our instinctive perceptions of men and women, but it's just not correct.

EDIT: added another link

Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.

Yeah and she can pound dirt. And may god help any man who falls for this bullshit.

This seems unnecessarily heated and low effort. Please don't post like this.

If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.

Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?

My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.

One complained to us about how her “asshole” husband was “pressuring” her during law school… by expressing his anticipation of her making a professional salary.

I’m curious- was this woman going to law school for fun? Ludicrously expensive hobby if so.

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Checks out with my perceptions. Female co-workers who get pregnant are in zero rush to return to the office, often registering glee that they get to duck out of staring at a computer screen for 8 hours a day; a good number strongly hinting that they have no intention of resuming their work, but don't want to tip off their superiors yet. Those that do return often only do so for a little bit before checking out entirely. You follow up with them on Facebook at a later date and see they have fully transitioned to homemaking and child-raising, with maybe a small side gig.

I've only known one exception; lady formerly in the Navy on her third pregnancy who has always taken the bare minimum of maternity leave before jumping back in the workforce. I once joked that she should milk it for all its worth, and she actually registered some serious judgments against women who do that, and recalled that even in the Navy she noticed how many peers would suddenly find themselves knocked up when deployment came up. "Freeloading, fucking whores" were her words.

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deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.

Why are they having so many kids then?

I think the answer is ‘they aren’t, lower class women have a replacement fertility rate because the state pays the bills but that doesn’t involve the majority of lower class men’

Because they proceed not to support them very well

I'll rephrase this. Deindustrialization destroyed the ability of middle-class men to set their children up for an equivalent QOL.

Poor individuals can easily raise poor kids, who will go on to be poor adults. Middle class parents are struggling to raise kids in a manner that allows their children to end up middle class.

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This lines up with my feelings quite well. Yet another feminist who can't get over her perspective as a woman. Particularly egregious in my mind is her paragraph on the domestic sphere:

Then there’s the domestic sphere. Last summer, a Psychology Today article caused a stir online by pointing out that “dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing as relationship standards rise.” No longer dependent on marriage as a means to financial security or even motherhood (a growing number of women are choosing to create families by themselves, with the help of reproductive technology), women are “increasingly selective,” leading to a rise in lonely, single young men — more of whom now live with their parents than a romantic partner. Men also account for almost 3 of every 4 “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide, alcohol abuse or an overdose.

She spares no thought for the fact that while women are no longer dependent on marriage as a means to having a family, men are still very dependent on women and thus increasingly at their mercy.

Uh, she is sparing a thought for it right there. She gets that it sucks, she just isn't willing to go for the Obvious Solution.

No, her thinking is that women are finally equal to men and therefore that men are suffering because they find having gone from dominating women to merely being on par with them intolerable. She (charitably) doesn't understand that leveling the playing field between men and women only where men previously held the advantage doesn't actually create equality in relationships, which is actually driving this suffering.

I mean that’s not even to note that while women are totally capable of being single moms, that is acknowledged by everyone except brain damaged ideologues as a bad thing for everyone involved except the sperm donor.

If there is any ever conflict between men's or women's interests, feminists will always side with women. As you've pointed out, feminism will never place any obligation or constraint on female behaviour towards the objective of strengthening the family unit. Frankly, I hope at a societal level that boys and men act in their own interests and don't harness themselves to constraints unless they find a partner that is making similar sacrifices. Luckily there are women with common sense who make the choice to do what is best for their man and their children (and ultimately themselves) rather than subscribing to the feminist lie.

If there is any ever conflict between men's or women's interests, feminists will always side with women.

And so will the vast majority of men. Which is why the problem is not going to get solved.

Well not solved by feminists, but one hopes that's not the only sort of people that will attempt to solve it.

If all the feminists and the vast majority of men always side with women, the problem will not get solved. Men have various reasons for siding with women; one of the most popular is to talk about their daughters (whether actual or potential). Makes you want to ask them "well, what about your SONS, do you not care about them?" But the answer to that is pretty clearly "yes". Sons are generally expected to fend for themselves regardless of what disadvantages are placed upon them.

I actually very much agree with you, that men and women are by nature complementary and cooperative. However, I was arguing withing the author's own feminist frame of reference.

Indeed, if you look at historical examples of patriarchal systems that codify the rules, you'll note that they usually codified the rules to restrain the de facto power of men over their dependents. Presumably this is mostly men seeking to prioritize the interests of their daughters over their sons in law.

As a strategy, tribalism dominates non-tribalism. If there's a "team women" but no "team men", then men are going to be steamrollered.

The key to understanding the “problem with men” today is to look at contingent rewards. Men are motivated toward behaviors by the rewards that follow most efficiently. The rewards are the same as always: sex, money, social status, and fun about sum up the most powerful rewards that men pursue socially. With contingent rewards in mind, consider Andrew Tate.

Andrew Tate made his money by manipulating women into his online prostitution ring, who then manipulated lonely men into sending them their money. He also, in the past couple years, has sat down for interviews with journalists like Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan; has won the admiration of millions of young men; has a number of attractive women profess interest in him; has riches and status symbols; and has even scored a date with Jordan Peterson’s daughter. This last one symbolically sums up the whole point to be made: the man who embodies moralizing to the public couldn’t even influence his own daughter to not spend time with a wealthy criminal. None of Peterson’s words had any influence on behavior. The men pursue their rewards, and his daughter pursues the rewarded man. What do men take away from this?

What matters are the rewards, and the behaviors that efficiently lead to the rewards. Andrew Tate, regardless his immorality, has obtained great rewards that are independent of any toothless “moral attack”. Because men want only rewards, they aren’t going care much for the complaining of random news writers and politicians and priests. What does that have to do with me becoming dominant and bedding attractive women, which is what I want? And so it’s no surprise that some men look up to Andrew Tate, without a care in the world for his crimes or immorality or the golden rule of morality or such things. There is no “moral police” to make any impact on his rewards!

Now you might say, “well hold it right there, buck-o, because I’ve see men on Twitter rail against Andrew Tate”. Yes, you do. And have you considered that railing against Tate is merely a way for them to rail Kate later that week? Have you not noticed that those men live in cities, that their tweets have a lot of engagement from women, that their public Spotify playlists contain Mazzy Star? Andrew Tate would travel all the way to Romania to obtain his social rewards, and you don’t think this guy’s lazy tweet isn’t in some mysterious way motivated by the same root interest? He’s not standing outside the Romanian embassy, he is expressing a view on a social media platform filled with women. He’s not writing this in the boy’s group chat. He’s not going over to 4chan to express his view to those “at-risk”. It’s performative. And yet, it’s not any more performative than all social expressions. All of it is behavior performed to obtain reward.

Now let’s look at the other extreme. Incels? Incels don’t exist in a quantity significant enough to warrant any care. “Incel” is the deactivation word that cues our mind to turn off from thinking deeply. (Apropos, it works by castigating a group of men as unable to obtain the most foundational reward.) The opposite of Andrew Tate is the sexless and wifeless. What’s going on with them?

In the case of the loveless men, there are a few major problems. First, there is an absurd amount of superstimuli accessible to mollify male energy: tik tok, porn, and video games. There is a clear association between hours spent on these and sexlessness whether or not any scientist has studied it. Second, we have eradicated what I will call the “foreplay” of social reward. There was a time where young men and young women would flirt at any opportunity in social “intercourse”, and where not complimenting a woman on her beauty was seen as faux pas. Women would have to be subtle about rejecting men flatly, so as to not ruin the delicate social gamification at play. This “social foreplay” incentivized prosocial behavior from both sexes. In its absence, women look for their required allotment of attention by posting lewds on social media, and men look for it by looking at said lewds and watching porn. Women, too, have their version of porn. It’s Mazzy Star songs and passively using dating apps.

The third issue for the loveless, as evidenced by the differential of female yearly sex versus male yearly sex, is dating apps. This is boring to dwell on, but the same men who watch the Andrew Tate content are mastering the art of manipulating women for easier sex on dating apps. Because it’s morally illegal today for fathers to control their daughters (see: the Petersons), women are routinely taken advantage of for easy sex. At the same time, some of them believe it’s fine to have short-term sexual flings, because they have no moral training and in any case there are no moral police. The moral result will be at lot of loveless men and women, a lot of old whores and old virgins, perhaps more assisted and unassisted suicides in the (not-)coming decades.

So we see neatly that social dysfunction springs out of perverse social reward structures. The only possible solution is to put order to social reward, which was the norm in human history. What do we make of religion? Here’s something to dwell on: religiosity across milieu perfectly tracks with how well the religion punishes immoral behavior and rewards good behavior. At the various heights of Christian practice, being a sinner meant ostracism or extreme loss of social capital. Being a “good Christian” meant men doing business with you and marrying their daughters to you. In current Hasidim, and current traditional Islam, we see the same phenomenon. A religion without intense judgment on behavior becomes weak, ineffectual, incapable of truly changing the nature of men.

When we talk about men in the past who lived for God, we forget that living for God just so happened to line up exactly with the efficient path to social reward. We forget that God was to them the justification for all social reinforcement and punishment. For the Amish, social status and marriageability are actually decided by righteousness — not with perfect accuracy, but more than 50%. Community participation is essential, and those who do not participate are completely excluded from the polis. These also happened to be the most fecund Americans.

Overall, I guess I totally disagree with the article’s framing of the issues. Masculinity, manliness, Incels? Red herrings. The issue is that men chase rewards, and the rewards today are disordered. In sum, there is less reward for marriage and honesty, there is more reward for pursuing entertainment alternatives, and there are less available women because they too choose disordered rewards. Whether men “behave like men” or whatever is completely erroneous and doesn’t matter.

The opposite of Andrew Tate is the sexless and wifeless.

Is he even having a wife?

The opposite of Andrew Tate is the sexless and wifeless.

Incels (in the sense of men who are greatly conscious and worried about their lack of sexual success) may be at the opposite spectrum of Andrew Tate in terms of sexual success, but that's just one aspect of difference, and a pretty obvious one. I know some (but not all) incels who differ from lothario types not in their attitude towards women (entitled, needy, cold) but in their competence. If someone's difference from Andrew Tate is that they're less competent speakers/dressers/abusers, then I don't regard them as the opposite of Andrew Tate, any more than I regard a basement dwelling fascist as the opposite of Hitler because the latter was powerful.

Not All Incels are Like That, obviously. Maybe not most, for all I know.

Andrew Tate made his money by manipulating women into his online prostitution ring

Is it even a prostitution ring? I thought it was essentially camgirl stuff -- which to me is more like porn than whoring even if it's done by livestream.

Other than pissing off the left with his TRP rhetoric, it seems his biggest mistake was in 'getting high on his own supply', which opens up the rape charges. (or committing actual rape, as the case may be)

Otherwise how does he really differ from (say) Hugh Hefner?

From the texts I’ve seen, he actually used psychological manipulation tactics and possibly illegal coercion to get the women to work for him. Then, he would get the girls to scam and lie to the men to get their money (claiming they will meet them, etc).

More like a strip club owner (or every sales manager ever!) than a porno publisher I guess -- still doesn't seem that bad. (apart from the alleged rape of course)

Otherwise how does he really differ from (say) Hugh Hefner?

Aesthetics, attitude, and tone, I guess. We associate Hefner with classiness in a way that we don't for Tate. Hefner was a man who ran a popular publication and probably kept the sexuality more wink-wink, while Tate would need a lot of effort to shed the MMA Bro image he has.

Read a vintage Playboy some time. It really was publishing interesting news, fashion, fiction, interviews.

At the very least, imagine if Tate also published SlowBoring on substack.

Thank you for articulating the argument about this 'everything is about sex and status' take that is so popular on here. I've been trying to say something similar but I think you nailed it - it's totally tautological and impossible to disprove.

Reported for quality contribution!

[the critique that this is a “just so” story and only simplistically explains things post-hoc]

Well, there are two ways to look at the pursuit of noble goals. The first way is to declare that there is no nobility in any goal pursuit, because in fact the pursuer just wants primitive satisfactions. The second way — my own way — is to instead say that the noble pursuit is comprised of primitive satisfactions. Nobility itself is constructed of less noble enjoyments, but this doesn’t mean that the noble pursuit is not real. Let me give a random example of a Kurdish woman dying for her home village against a radical Islamist invasion. This is noble, right? I would say so. So why would she do it? First, because she was raised in a tribal and traditional society with strict moral rules (eg infidelity means jail time), so various enjoyments in her life were seen as originating from her Kurd family and tribal ties, rather than her own individual actions and efforts. This naturally creates a love for her tribe and family. Second, something good for the Kurds is good for those whom she loves and who look like her and act like her and live like her and share her blood. We can call this a “selfish noble action” if we want: she sacrifices herself to make the lives of those she is most like better, because she was raised to learn that she herself is a part of a whole — and this learning required the tribe to exert control over individuals’ behaviors. Most selfishly, her actions benefit her siblings, cousins, and her children if applicable.

No one can seriously pursue some noble value as a goal [without reward]

The problem is that if we analyze the lives of the people who seriously pursue noble things, they always exist within an ecosystem of rewards. The architects, composers, authors, and scientists expect to get paid and be admired. They expect to earn accolades and compete over them. They take slights to their status — their worthiness of reward — extremely seriously. They might aim to have sex with groupies. At military academies, where noble behavior is essential, reward and punishment related to behavior and status are neurotically and systematically meted out. And if we ever have another D Day, there will be soldiers behind you with their guns loaded to ensure that your “selfless noble actions” are carried out. The rare exceptions, like that Russian mathematician, are visibly insane.

Or, what better look at noble actions than a ship crew during the Age of Sail? It just so happens that the crews which behaved most admirably were the ones that were rewarded more justly by their Admiral. Violation of the norms of the status hierarchy, which is a violation of the structure of reward, meant public flagellation or death. Doing a good job? More alcohol — a straight shot to the reward system. Not paying sailors? Suddenly there is no more nobility, we are pirates now. And when they are on land again, they expect a lot of respect from the public and especially women.

where the disdain for pursuing these things "manipulatively" comes from.

Because it’s bad for the community. Which is why, if an Andrew Tate existed in the Islamic World, he would not be bedding but beheaded. If he existed in the 19th century, he would go the way of Joseph Smith. I am interested in what is best for a community because that’s the fun game I play in my head when writing at places like themotte, and it’s a hobby I’ve had since a teen. Do I participate in it out of a desire to be superior to ideological competitors? Well, probably — I’m only human. To quote Pascal’s thoughts,

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags, and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it

—

How can you claim to step outside of the game to deliver judgment?

But I am in a game to deliver the best judgment. If I’m wrong, and someone judges better, then I lose the match. This game doesn’t occur everywhere. Try to deliver the best judgment to the girl at the bar who asks if you like her tattoo, or your friend who is deep into crypto. Quickly you will lose your reward. I think with the right organization of competition, you can maximize truth-seeking. Men have an instinctive drive for competition which is most obvious looking at online gaming.

Why is everyone else assumed to follow shallow mechanistic signals like ants following the sugar, without ever having higher ideals in mind?

Because this is how everyone behaves unless they are in an intense competition of discourse. Polemics are the backbone of truth-seeking. Could we ever come to scientific truth if we didn’t make scientists compete over accolades and positions? And even this isn’t enough, right? Just recently the President of Stanford was found to have fabricated his results from his scientist days. Cheating and replication crises abound. Because scientists only compete over truth insofar as that truth is rewarded. If your reward is feeling superior to scientists, you don’t have to rely on the peer review process.

I can't tell you what the "real terminal values" are

I can give it a go. I 100% agree that some of those things are not terminal. I think what is terminal is novelty of instinctive pleasure, the vanity I mention above, and truly just sex. Sex with different beautiful women is surely a terminal reward. Being in a room with other men and sensing their respect and/or defeat is very likely an ingrained instinctual terminal reward, and maybe one day we’ll discover weird hormones that are released which affect our reward system (I’m sure of it). “Novel instinctive pleasure” means stuff like driving a really fast car; it’s interesting that even hamsters enjoy running on a wheel, and wild animals will play with swings and balls. This also allows us to make sense of addiction and how insanely terrifying it is, and how it can affect people of any social status. For an alcoholic, alcohol is just pure reward like sex and respect. It competes with the most primitive pleasures. Absurd anti-social risks are posed with alcohol and gambling because they are so damn primitive.

It seems to be a kind of fallacy to assume that evil is easy.

I don’t disagree here. Andrew Tate is clearly very intelligent and has great speaking skills. I would say that’s tangential to my main point.

I agree with the vast majority of this, with the caveat that I don't think it's good to flat-out asserting

There is a clear association between hours spent on these and sexlessness whether or not any scientist has studied it.

without any evidence. (Although I'm sure it's true).

How does the arrest of Andrew Tate affect your thoughts here? Seems to be a belated consequence but a pretty big one.

Tate’s arrest came way too late, and it’s a house arrest right now. If he does go to jail for a long time, I think this would have an effect on reducing imitation of his lifestyle, but it’s hard to say how much. Because I think people recognize that his arrest is partially due to his popularity and that if he weren’t so popular he probably wouldn’t be pursued as he is. And being rich + getting laid for a decade or more and then going to jail is actually a bargain many men will take; it’s essentially the kernel of criminality.

If he does go to jail for a long time, I think this would have an effect on reducing imitation of his lifestyle, but it’s hard to say how much.

Why? Young men with no prospects imitating criminals (and eventually joining them) has been a thing for... like ever.

being rich + getting laid for a decade or more and then going to jail is actually a bargain many men will take; it’s essentially the kernel of criminality.

Hah! You're not wrong :)

How can modern 'gender roles' possibly be sustainable? Fertility rates below 2.1 mean that civilization itself is unsustainable in the medium-term (let alone the long-term where more fecund civilizations will overcome less fecund peers, ceteris paribus). Either it dwindles to nothing in a kind of evaporative cooling where the few remaining young people leave their many senescent dependants for greener fields. Or you get mass immigration, the importing of other societies. Either the immigrants assimilate and age into oblivion, perpetuating the problem, or the natives assimilate and their civilization is gone.

The universe does have rules - reproducing is rewarded. It's not like worrying about masculinity is a new thing (see all the concerns about the degeneracy of the youth as the article points out). But in this case, we know masculinity and femininity are broken because they're not working at sustaining the population! Anti-social is not a bad thing if society is broken (not in a small way but in a terminal way).

All through this article there's an awkwardness as the author tries to describe a problem without admitting any kind of serious change is needed.

I’m convinced that men are in a crisis. And I strongly suspect that ending it will require a positive vision of what masculinity entails that is particular — that is, neither neutral nor interchangeable with femininity. Still, I find myself reluctant to fully articulate one. There’s a reason a lot of the writing on the crisis in masculinity ends at the diagnosis stage.

Then we get some banal, inoffensive, ineffective ideas of what masculinity should be:

We can find ways to work with the distinctive traits and powerful stories that already exist — risk-taking, strength, self-mastery, protecting, providing, procreating. We can recognize how real and important they are. And we can attempt to make them pro-social — to help not just men but also women, and to support the common good.

Like people say in the comments, this is just recycling 1950s Boy Scouts rhetoric, the sort of stuff you'd see in a Tom Swift novel. Did it work then? Maybe. Did it keep working? Obviously not. And it's a really facile thing to propose 'finding ways to work with powerful stories like self-mastery'. What does that mean in concrete terms? Nothing at all. WTF is self-mastery? Is the author proposing media manipulation, putting more strong father figures in film? Who knows, maybe we're expected to be mind-readers.

There's a model of how industrial states were run with medium-high fertility - women were not in the workforce at anything near the male participation rate. One option is taking women out of the workforce and higher education (a universally proven sterilizing agent), which entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is mass-scale human cloning, which also entails political difficulties and practical problems. Another option is rushing for life-extension or AI to bypass the problem entirely, which has problems of its own. Or we could try to found powerful religions like LDS or Islam or Orthodox Judaism. Or we can just wither away talking about pro-social stories of self-mastery and be written about in the history books of others.

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

But these aren't really 'options', they're destinies. There's no declining one of these paths.

I mean, I strongly disagree. I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever, at least under your worldivew.

I'd like to see a humanity that moves forward and values things more than just base reproduction. I'd like to see us value knowledge, and understanding, and frankly love. Even if it contradicts some of the transhumanist futures some other users believe in.

Demographics are not destiny, and never have been. Memes are destiny, and you'd better start acting like that's the case, or you'll be outcompeted.

This is a techno-optimist take. But I don't know that the techno-optimist take is well supported by evidence. The current elites will stay in power until they die in office- living much past 100 is just not attainable even for the elites.

Well yeah current older folks are dead. With the advance of the pace of science I see coming with AI and other advances though, I'm optimistic that anyone younger than say, 45 or 50 today, may be able to live a lot longer than people can right now.

Remember that it used to be almost impossible to survive things that are routine to cure nowadays. Medicine inexorably advances, and if we techno-optimists are right about the potential of AI that advance will be swift indeed.

Remember that maximum human lifespan hasn't really changed in centuries.

Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia. Remember that space was a celestial sphere thought unbreachable. Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.

The march of technology renders these claims pointless. We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.

Remember that humans couldn't fly for millenia.

Still can't. Humans can only build machines that fly.

Remember that sickness was seen as the devil's work.

Based on pandemic propaganda, it still is, except the Devil is now personified as a Republican instead of a humanoid with horns and tail, or a man of wealth and taste.

We will solve aging if given enough time, and if we keep on the right track.

This claim is vacuous, though.

Humans can only build machines that fly.

There are human-constructed flying objects in all four quadrants of the machine/not-machine//self-powered/human-powered schema.

(Normal aeroplane/helicopter/etc.; pedal-powered aircraft; helium balloon; hang-glider.)

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Sure, but they're talking about a technology change.

Before the internal combustion engine, the maximum human travel speed hadn't changed in centuries either.

Not to say that it's likely, but I think you're ignoring the essence of the argument.

The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200". Without this (bad) essence, it's no better than "well we seem to be very smart, surely we will figure out a way to increase the maximum lifespan real soon now" -- which seems pretty unconvincing given that it hasn't budged a bit for hundreds of years.

The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200".

You can't take the average argument for a position, you have to engage with the argument in play, because it only takes one good argument for something to be right. I can generate several hundred bad arguments for any position you want right now.

Even further, that wasn't the case this time. TheDag explicitly called out a technology change.

Quoting them:

I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever...

And when talking about what science is coming, they don't talk about past medical advances, but reference AI, presumably some sort of intelligence explosion.

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How can you strongly disagree to me saying 'we have no choice but to pick one of these options' and then say 'oh they'll follow the life-extension path', when that's a path I mentioned? Do you have a different path in mind or do you strongly disagree with the premise?

Demographics is destiny. You can't do anything if you don't exist. Numbers are power, though not the only source of power. In geopolitics, there's a struggle between the 1st and 3rd most populous states as to who will rule the system. There's a reason that Iceland and Monaco are not in the running and it's because they're not populous!

Even once we establish life extension, demographics still matter. The most populous states, ceteris paribus, will be still be stronger, have more geniuses, more capital, a bigger internal market, more resources... Exponentially growing populations of immortals can burn through a lot of resources very quickly.

Human values must ultimately be in accordance with the basic structure of the universe. Whatever else we do, we must not be diminishing in number, our civilization must not be unsustainable. When there's a conflict between memes and reality, reality wins. If knowledge, understanding and love are useful (and I think they are) in sustaining our species, then great! But if they or anything else is sabotaging us, then let's discard them before nature forces the issue.

How can you strongly disagree to me saying 'we have no choice but to pick one of these options' and then say 'oh they'll follow the life-extension path', when that's a path I mentioned? Do you have a different path in mind or do you strongly disagree with the premise?

The short answer is that I just get annoyed by the 'demographics is destiny' crowd because, as @self_made_human points out, I don't think that will be true for much longer.

Demographics is destiny. You can't do anything if you don't exist. Numbers are power, though not the only source of power. In geopolitics, there's a struggle between the 1st and 3rd most populous states as to who will rule the system. There's a reason that Iceland and Monaco are not in the running and it's because they're not populous!

Even once we establish life extension, demographics still matter. The most populous states, ceteris paribus, will be still be stronger, have more geniuses, more capital, a bigger internal market, more resources... Exponentially growing populations of immortals can burn through a lot of resources very quickly.

This seems to assume that humans will be net economic positives in the future, which I think is highly doubtful myself.

I suspect that in a decade or two, the power of a country will correlate far more strongly with the number of data centers and automated factories it possesses rather than the mere number of people living off UBI.

After a certain point, you don't need more people around, though as a person myself I'd rather we stay in charge.

In all likelihood, it's a battle between the US and China as to who'll have more automated factories. Surprisingly, China is ahead of the US in robots per worker (and so hugely ahead overall) despite the US having a head start. China has a more aggressive attitude towards manufacturing and industrial efficiency than the US.

Maybe South Korea is a competitor, they're well ahead in the 'robots per industrial worker' index of everyone except Singapore. But can South Korea secure the input resources needed, given their declining demography? Robots need iron, chemicals, mines, logistics, scale, young people to innovate with them. There's probably a critical mass of market size, brainpower and resources you need before you can develop a world-class robotics industry like China or America. It would surprise me if a small country was able to leapfrog the big powers. Can South Korea supply everything it needs domestically, or even most things? Can they compete in 'let's throw 10 billion at this gigafactory/huge research project'? I don't think so.

I reckon technological advancement and capital development (robots and datacentres) stem from high population + a bunch of other things like organization, IQ, geography and so on.

I think Asia has a distinct advantage here simply because they culturally value education far more than most of normie Americans. We don’t push our kids that hard even compared to European states. We don’t worry too much about grades and achievement, in fact we are often destroying our education system in the name of student’s feelings, or racial disparities. A lot of schools no longer have “gifted” programs to develop potential minds. There are schools no longer pushing to get kids into algebra before high school. If we weren’t attracting our engineers from abroad, we’d be even farther behind because of how bad our K-12 system is compared to Europe let alone Asia.

I reckon technological advancement and capital development (robots and datacentres) stem from high population + a bunch of other things like organization, IQ, geography and so on.

I agree, but I also expect automation technologies to diffuse quite fast, such that after a period of time economic progress will depend more on total resources available to a nation (perhaps surface area covered by a nation would a half decent proxy) instead of human-driven progress.

These articles are the dumbest thing. There's seemingly an entire industry of women giving men bad advice on whatever topic women know nothing about. 'Masculinity' is probably the worst one. What is only slightly less worse is the retreading of ground everytime it comes up. Where people pretend 'masculinity' is even a thing.

You are not your grandfather or great grandfather when it comes to physicality, but you are your grandfather when it comes to your brain.

In the 1940's a bunch of American soldiers came to Iceland to occupy it due to WW2. The social consequences where that of Icelandic women falling for the exotic soldiers. This became recognized as a social phenomena. Icelandic men didn't like it, Icelandic women didn't care insofar as there were no consequences. Given that the occupation forces almost outnumbered the male population of Iceland there was plenty of Icelandic male 'hysteria' surrounding the issue.

I like that example since it gives way to some very obvious truths. It doesn't matter how 'masculine' you are. There is no objective barometer. If the woman wants you then that's that. If she doesn't, you eat shit. No matter how much you work, no matter how big your hands and forearms get, you are always liable to be outcompeted and women will never apologize for choosing what they want. This is a competition. Be a winner, not a loser. Because believe me, you will never work as hard as an Icelandic farmer in the 1930's.

Similar story to be heard from Japan after the war. Was this veteran turned beggar not masculine enough? Did he not prove his worth? Fighting for the cause? No, because he's a loser.

You can replace the nerd lore of this guy with all the nonsense of 'becoming masculine' or in any way 'worthy'. It's the same dude otherwise.

Not to sound too much like something from MEMRI TV but in a world where a woman is opining on how men should best prove themselves to win her affection there is no 'masculinity'. Just pathetic men with no control over their society.

I was thinking about this recently as regards the periodic articles about veteran worship in American periodicals: Why don't we elect more veterans? We should because , and isn't Trump/Biden/Lindsay Graham disgusting?

And looking purely at Presidents, the answer is we elect veterans of victorious wars, but typically not those of lost wars. We had a long run of WWII presidents, no WWI presidents, Vietnam presidents, or Korea Presidents. We saw so many Vietnam vets run for president, and so many of that generation, and only draft dodgers won. GWOT generation hasn't run their course yet, but it doesn't look good.

Victory is good, defeat is bad. Trump, as usual, expresses the Id so much better than those in the media who love to scold him.

These articles are the dumbest thing. There's seemingly an entire industry of women giving men bad advice on whatever topic women know nothing about. 'Masculinity' is probably the worst one. What is only slightly less worse is the retreading of ground everytime it comes up. Where people pretend 'masculinity' is even a thing.

You are not your grandfather or great grandfather when it comes to physicality, but you are your grandfather when it comes to your brain.

Why do you dismiss this so readily? In my view, this topic is the crucial point of life for many men.

Why such a callous dismissal?

I don't find my 'dismissal' callous. I explain it in the rest of my post.

You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals. They give it away for free to those they actually like. And how much you work has nothing to do with it. That fact doesn't just leave the authors 'constructive masculinity' dead in the water, it leaves practically every 'socially positive' definition of masculinity dead in the water.

As other people have said, you don't necessarily have to bargain. Just attain high status and signal interest, and the rest takes care of itself.

I am optimistic we can find a way to encourage prosocial behavior without literally making women property.

Just attain high status and signal interest

I.e. bargain.

What type of mating situation would not be bargaining?

None. It's not that you are bargaining that's the point. It's what you are bargaining and what for.

You can't consider yourself 'masculine' after working away to become 'high status' to attain the thing some other guy has been getting without having to 'work'. It just doesn't add up. Which leaves all of these prosocial 'constructive masculinity' prescriptions dead in the water.

In short, consciously attempting to do something to attract women reduces your attractiveness to women, correct? So prosocial masculinity is a contradiction in terms because 'being prosocial to attract women' and 'attracting women' are incompatible, or at least orthogonal.

If so, I think it's somewhat true but also somewhat overstating the case. Unless you possess animal magnetism, trying to look a bit better is probably worth it. And increasing your status is also probably worth it. But it will never make you one of those men who just scores effortlessly.

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No, a bargain is a quid-pro-quo. "Oooh, that tall guy from Goldman Sachs is so hot, and he's looking at me" is not a bargain.

You are bargaining with the hypothetical woman when you decide to become a tall guy working at Goldman Sachs to garner her interest. You bring being tall and having money, she brings whatever.

Making oneself attractive to women is not the same as bargaining with a woman. And the hypothetical tall Goldman Sachs guy didn't choose to be tall anyway. As you yourself said, she'll give it away for free to him.

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This is starting to sound like the noncentral fallacy, and perhaps a particularly bad version of it. "I can stretch the meaning of X to include Y, therefore I can extend judgements about central cases of X to Y" is not a good argument.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yCWPkLi8wJvewPbEp/the-noncentral-fallacy-the-worst-argument-in-the-world

Is a woman wearing makeup to attract men "bargaining" too?

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How will you cleanse your hands of blood?

If there is no god, and we replaced him, there is no cleansing anything. We're in charge. We are so terribly free.

The point of god is to be the final judge of man, to decide between life and death. Women are life, men are death.

In this scenario, it is the role of men to take up the mantle of god in nature and control what lives and what dies.

The blood on god's hands goes all the way up to the collarbone.

Only one choice, judge or be judged.

Only one outcome, in the long run.

We serve death, and become him.

Like our forefathers before us.

How black exactly do you want your pills?

Dillard says that evolution loves death more than it loves you or me.

She was so close. The sky is blue, and God loves the infantry.

What are your thoughts on the Hock?

If there is no god, and we replaced him, there is no cleansing anything. We're in charge. We are so terribly free.

The point of god is to be the final judge of man, to decide between life and death. Women are life, men are death.

Yes Nietschze argues that, I don't. We aren't in charge. The reason we can even exist with billions of men competing in a similar status hierarchy without killing each other is due to religion. Sure, we killed the outright belief in God, but the very nature of God means that He can never be truly killed.

The point of God is to be the final judge of humans. He decides between life and death. He is the bridge between the red society we inhabit, and the beautiful future society we can become. He's never truly dead unless we give up on the hope that the future can be better than the present.

Or we just make our own judgements and swing the blade with our own hands.

No gods, no masters. Just men.

So you're proposing we worship the individual over the collective?

Not in the least. There is nothing to worship. We are not even individuals. We are the temporary combinations of two bloodlines, struggling to reproduce our genetics into the next generation.

Women choose who reproduces, men choose who doesn't.

We are not even individuals.

If not us, who is? If no one is, then what is the use of not defining whatever we are as individuals?

Semantics. I just don't think we are distinct from our physical bodies, nor our genetic heritage. We inherit much of what we are, and thus are not really distinct from the line of our ancestors, or our offspring.

Damn son. That's the blackpill right there.

The elephant in the room is that worship of anything else, like the State or the Volk, has been taboo since the Allies won the war.

I mean, fair point.

I appreciate the Jung quote, and I'll look into it. But why do you see withdrawal, pessimism, and passivity as the answer?

Withdrawal, pessimism, and passivity aren't "the answer". They're acceptance that there is no answer. That sometimes you have reached a state where you will inevitably lose.

Man how do you and @JTarrou get out of bed in the morning?

I'm a happy man is how. All this shit is just how I see the world. How we react to it is the important bit. Being doomed is no reason not to have fun.

Also keep in mind that not only will we always be doomed, but we have always been doomed. The five stages of grief are bullshit, but they get one thing right - you have to accept reality as it is before you can make peace with it.

Do you think seeing the world as doomed might increase the probability of actual doom?

Only for those powerful enough to substantially contribute to averting it. Which is likely no one here.

I know this isn't helpful, but my flinch reaction to dudes who have masculinity problems is to scoff and feel contempt.

Like, what's so fucking hard about it? And then I remember normal mind bias and tell myself that what I just said is "Listen, picking up heavy stuff is easy! Just lift more than you can lift!"

I will say that building your masculinity on the attention of a particular woman or women in general is cuck behavior, and needs to be discouraged wherever possible. Even the MGTOW dudes still construct their whole identity around women, you gotta stop that shit.

But that runs into "Just stop feeling that way! Lift more than you can lift!" again.

Even the MGTOW dudes still construct their whole identity around women, you gotta stop that shit.

How do you mean that?

Negative attention is still attention, negative affection is still affection. True MGTOW behavior is a Isaac Newton style absolute 0 on the number line, not a -10. If you feel the need to label yourself MGTOW, if you put any serious amount of thought or energy into it, you are making an own goal at the first pass.

It's that meditation problem of Not thinking about Not thinking.

I will say that building your masculinity on the attention of a particular woman or women in general is cuck behavior, and needs to be discouraged wherever possible. Even the MGTOW dudes still construct their whole identity around women, you gotta stop that shit.

All evolutionary pressures ensure that men absolutely should care about what women want. The men who don't... will just not reproduce and die off.

But appearing to care, or caring in the wrong ways (e.g. being subservient to women) are both unattractive to women and unfashionable to other men. The secret is to care enough to entice women, while pretending not to care.

The men who don't... will just not reproduce and die off.

I'm not so sure. You have to desire women, sure, but care about what they want? Only a bit.

My experience is that being (relative) high value and signaling interest is much more effective than 'caring' about what someone wants. The same goes for friendships. People want to be desired by high value people, they don't want servants. They want a at least an equal exchange in status, but most likely an increase (or the perception of an increase).

Once you're in a relationship things obviously change a bit.

My experience is that being (relative) high value

Being "high value" is "caring what women want". A lot of the advice places like TRP dispense are things like "pump iron" and "buy clothes that fit", which are things women care about since modern dating is very dependent on physical attractiveness. But then, TRP will say goofy things like "but don't do it for women, do it for yourself".

What you describe are also actionable ways for someone to improve themselves.

No, being high value is being high value. You're high value to yourself, to other men and to women. Why? Because you provide value and this is broadly useful.

The point is to avoid focusing on what women want because that distorts and ruins your ability to evaluate things. If you focus on improving you'll be better off regardless of whether women like you better or not. Impressing women isn't the only reason to do things, it's one reason among many. People are looking for shortcuts to get ahead in life but that usually doesn't work very well, whether that is for impressing women, making friends or getting ahead in your career.

I'm married with kids but it's still as useful to me to be seen as high value by society around me as it was when I was 18 and single, because both the perception of high value and actual high value is useful.

No, being high value is being high value. You're high value to yourself, to other men and to women. Why? Because you provide value and this is broadly useful.

What? This is just circular reasoning.

The point is to avoid focusing on what women want because that distorts and ruins your ability to evaluate things.

No it doesn't. If a guy wants to focus on attracting women, follows online advice of lifting weights and improving appearance, and thereby starts attracting more women, then that's mission accomplished. It doesn't need to be cloaked in some superstitious silliness of "it only works if you think you're doing for yourself instead of specifically your ability to attract women, bro".

Again, men's perception of "value" is utterly warped around what women want for obvious evolutionary reasons. Stuff like physical fitness, having lots of money, being outgoing and confident, etc. are all stuff women value, and so men value it in themselves and others. There's a reason it's very difficult to think of a male role-model who wouldn't be successful with women.

How about all the scientists and philosophers throughout history who achieved incredible things that did not in any way correlate to success with women? The path of the scholar or monk is a totally legitimate historical archetype for men to aspire toward, but such men have not historically been sexually successful.

I'll admit that scientists are probably the best counterexample, although I don't think it's a killshot. Scientists are well-respected, and while it's not the path to becoming a billionaire, they're also well paid. "Scientist" can sometimes evoke notions of a weird introvert in a lab with thick glasses, but that's not the type of person who's a role model. Instead, people model themselves on someone like Oppenheimer who was a very respected leader in the field and who had multiple lovers.

Monks are just flatly not popular male role models, outside of maybe their stoicism which is just a conventionally appreciated male trait.

Again, men's perception of "value" is utterly warped around what women want for obvious evolutionary reasons. Stuff like physical fitness, having lots of money, being outgoing and confident, etc. are all stuff women value, and so men value it in themselves and others.

Is this a joke?

More effort than this, please.

Not in the slightest.

Like, what's so fucking hard about it?

What's so fucking hard about finding meaning in a world where meaning seems pointless and nothing matters? Do you even hear yourself?

Frankly in this post you're a caricature. You're discussing masculinity as if it's something self-evident, related to lifting heavier and heavier iron bars. (of all things...)

Do you really think a standard dude who lifts heavy today is better than a Roman emperor like Marcus Aurelius? If you truly see masculinity as reducible to how many pounds you can lift, I feel sorry for you.

I think you kinda missed the entire point of the post, and the metaphor.

I will explain it less off the cuff: Performing masculinity is easy for me, I've never had any angst over it. Thus, I feel contempt for men for whom it is not easy. Then, I remember normal mind bias and realize that my feelings are as justified as me feeling contempt for a dude with palsy not being able to lift what I can lift, and that it is unfair.

What's so fucking hard about finding meaning in a world where meaning seems pointless and nothing matters? Do you even hear yourself?

There is meaning all around though. This sounds a lot like projection to me.

Frankly in this post you're a caricature. You're discussing masculinity as if it's something self-evident, related to lifting heavier and heavier iron bars. (of all things...)

That is very clearly a metaphor...

Yeah I was a bit drunk when I replied. And projecting, well yeah of course. Aren't we all?

How is a young man in his twenties, armed with a useless college degree and forced to work at a supermarket to get by, supposed to find purpose in what he's doing? How can he feel accomplished, or masculine, or empowered? He definitely can't rely on God or religion for that feeling. If he tries, he'll be overwhelmed by relentless mockery and cynicism from his society.

Your grocery clerk has failed to achieve social status in a world where that was ostensibly possible, where society inculcated a belief that he should pursue it, and where he did, in fact, invest considerable effort in pursuing it, in the form of 17 years of formal education.

On top of this, he has to contend with the fact that modern societies have broken down all formal and most informal barriers to mixing across status levels and have eliminated any material requirement for women to marry. As has been discussed ad nauseam at this point, in combination with female hypergamy this is very detrimental to his prospects with the opposite sex.

A final consideration is, to borrow a Marxist term, alienation of labor. Your clerk's job does produce value, but that value isn't some tangible thing. It's a benefit to the store in higher throughput or better loss prevention vs. self-checkout, on a spreadsheet he'll never see and doesn't care about because he has no ownership stake in the enterprise.

So, your grocery clerk is probably mostly sexless, and feels like an underachiever performing meaningless work, where, say, a medieval peasant farmer at the same age would be married, would have precisely the status society told him he would and should have, and would be engaged in work that directly, physically provided for an essential material need of his wife, his children, his aging parents. It's this difference, much more than any lack of a connection with the divine, that results in his dissatisfaction.

Nietzsche's suggested solution is that the New Men must 'become deities' to be worthy of God's murder. Regrettably, as we've found out, not everyone can ascend to godhood. Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?

Let those of us that can build the rest of them into Gods. Join me. We must teach them to walk. We must teach them to shine.

Less metaphorically, we must scale the tools of agency and communication, unearth the wishes of each human that are left fearfully unspoken- working with each person individually to explore them, and crystallize that individual's Godhood as a semi-autonomous system that they may further wield as they grow.

I love your endgame viewpoint, what you're striving for... but how do we get there from here? How do we bridge the gap between those who deserve their own world and those who strive for it?

I don't know how @CloudHeadedTranshumanist sees it, but as far as I'm concerned, all a transhumanist future requires is to sit back and twiddle our thumbs (well, us specifically, not the entire world taking a day off) because regardless of ideological appeal, transhumanism is inevitable when there's technological progress. If not inevitable, then by far the default path into the future.

The reason why I explicitly praise transhumanism and spread it is to accelerate the process, not because it wouldn't happen anyway.

We gradually cure more diseases, until we breakthrough and cure aging. We keep fucking with power generation, and even if we don't get commercial fusion or a room temperature superconductors, even plain fission is amazing.

We start with MRNA vaccines, and we proceed to robust gene therapy. We simply try to replace missing limbs with adequate artifical counterparts, and then market forces inevitably at least try and make them better than the real deal.

You just have to ride the wave of the future, some of us just want to paddle too.

(And this is all ignoring AI, because at that point the future is transhuman whether you like it or not!)

Man I've got to hold off on the rum so I can make it with you guys. Sometimes I forget how incredible the future is going to be.

The future is going to be amazing, and hopefully we'll all be there to see it.

If you want a vision of the future, Winston, imagine crunchy corn, yum, kittypaws prrr, nyum nyum nyum icecream, yum -- forever.

What about my funkopops?

Sometimes I forget how incredible the future is going to be.

What, life as a brain in a jar?

Forget all the 50s techno-optimism SF "we'll have endless free energy, space colonies, eternal youth, and eventually fantastic cyborg bodies where we can fly like birds, swim like dolphins, and run as fast as Superman!"

Nah, all that is too expensive in material. Easier to be a brain in a jar that is wired up to a VR version of "eternal youth, flying and swimming, living in a space colony", and all the rest of it.

The future is you being owned, in effect, by the likes of Meta and whatever mega-corporations are under the AIs running the economy (if we get AI that far).

We’re already ‘owned in effect’ my friend. Humans have never been free and never will be, in the literal sense. We need society and others not to go completely batshit.

Brain in a jar? Well it’ll be a little weird but hell if I get to extend my natural lifespan a few hundred years, I’d imagine I might get bored with a normal human body anyway.

I don’t deny that we could end up with a horrible future. It’s certainly possible. But I think better futures are possible and more likely. I also think that pessimistic, doomer takes actively push against that good future.

Sometimes I forget how incredible the future is going to be.

Why do you think you're going to benefit from any of this?

@self_made_human has already expressed concerns about being pushed out by AI and I don't know your situation but unless you're on the board of a big corporation I don't think you have any leverage over the development and adoption of these advances.

In short, I agree with Scott's Meditations on Moloch (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/). One of the few mechanisms that limits a race to the bottom is the physical and mental limits on what humans can endure. Transhumanism promises to make these limits programmable.

We simply try to replace missing limbs with adequate artifical counterparts, and then market forces inevitably at least try and make them better than the real deal.

In video games, market forces gave us fun games with ever-increasing graphic fidelity and then veered sideways into DLC, lootboxes, and other exploitative practices because that's where the money was. Market forces gave us the world wide web and then swiftly optimised it for ad exposure and addiction. What makes you think your new limbs won't have a shelf life of only a few years like smartphones do, so that walking becomes effectively a subscription service?

we proceed to robust gene therapy

Which will at best be required to compete with your colleagues on an even footing, as adderall seems increasingly to be. At worst, we will finally be able to rid the majority of humanity of the primal impulses that make them resist the obviously-correct rule of their betters: conservativism, religion, the desire for personal fulfilment...

until we breakthrough and cure aging

Bluntly, what makes you think that the people who develop and own these technologies will want to spend eternity with you?

One of the few mechanisms that limits a race to the bottom is the physical and mental limits on what humans can endure. Transhumanism promises to make these limits programmable.

The only there even is a race at all is because human cognitive and physical labor isn't yet entirely obsolete.

That's what AI is for, and given that it's 2023, the usual reply that advanced AI doesn't exist is no longer true. It just isn't broadly superhuman.

In video games, market forces gave us fun games with ever-increasing graphic fidelity and then veered sideways into DLC, lootboxes, and other exploitative practices because that's where the money was. Market forces gave us the world wide web and then swiftly optimised it for ad exposure and addiction. What makes you think your new limbs won't have a shelf life of only a few years like smartphones do, so that walking becomes effectively a subscription service?

Uh, IDK about you, but there are plenty of video games that aren't just narrowly disguised Skinner Boxes out there, and there are plenty of parts of the internet out there that haven't degenerated to Tiktok levels. I'm the case of the latter, look, we're in one.

Our cars aren't designed like F1 vehicles where the engines need to be replaced after our every race. Our phones don't catch fire after their battery runs out of charge. Those sound like excellent ways to make a profit, I wonder why manufacturers don't do that..

If you're so concerned about the longevity of your limbs, then buy models known to be robust, or stick with your biological ones. Heads up, they're not forever either, you'll start getting aches and pains well before you reach the lifetime warranty.

Which will at best be required to compete with your colleagues on an even footing, as adderall seems increasingly to be. At worst, we will finally be able to rid the majority of humanity of the primal impulses that make them resist the obviously-correct rule of their betters: conservativism, religion, the desire for personal fulfilment...

No amount of gene therapy can help a baseline human become competitive with a mid-future AGI. Biology isn't that robust, and the modifications required to make a human on par with a purpose built AGI look awfully like turning a human into a robot/AGI. I wouldn't complain, since I think that's awesome, but I stress that the existence of humans is a luxury good in the future. It's like trying to gene therapy a Peregrine Falcon into being faster than an F22 Raptor. You might get a really fast bird out of it, but it's not beating a jet aircraft without a rocket strapped to its ass.

Either we accept that humans are allowed to exist while being economically unproductive, or (almost) all of us die of starvation.

Even concerned as I am, I still think the former is more likely than the latter.

Bluntly, what makes you think that the people who develop and own these technologies will want to spend eternity with you?

Same reason that you, I, and Bill Gates drink the exact same can of coke. Market forces and outside of some weird Hollywood morality plays, there's no reason to assume the technology will stay extremely expensive.

I stress that the existence of humans is a luxury good in the future. It's like trying to gene therapy a Peregrine Falcon into being faster than an F22 Raptor

And how many falcons are out there, except as conscious re-creation of mediaeval falconry for the tourist experience? Sure. we still have falconry, but it's not the same as when it was an important part of life. Humans may indeed become a luxury good - which means cutting down numbers of humans drastically. Why does the AI need billions of us, when a picked population of a couple million for traits that are interesting and amusing will do just fine?

Luxury goods mean scarcity, remember.

Falcons did not raise humans from scratch with input into our core programming, to their detriment.

On the other hand, we can simply make AI care about us, and want to keep us around and in charge well after we're otherwise useless.

Of course, the "simply" elides the difficulty of this task, hence all the fuss about AI Alignment, but at least we know it's an option, unlike falcons or horses who have to put up or shut up.

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Look at what happened to horses the moment they stopped being necessary.

Thanks for replying! Sorry, I have more cynicism :P

EDIT: To be clear, I was a transhumanist back in the day and I'm still optimistic about certain things. Most obviously I think sensory augmentations are pretty straightforwardly good and don't really have any nasty social consequences. I tried the fingertip magnet thing once (with superglue, not surgery) and I would be very interested in a non-surgical version of North Sense (https://www.vice.com/en/article/78ke3x/cyborg-implant-magnetic-north). I'm also very interested in GPT provided we can get a leaked version of the original weights and do our own RLHF. It's anything related to the body or brain that worries me, especially things that can alter personality or desires, or things that lead to involution such as increased ability to ignore fatigue / burnout. I also want the output of the whole process to remain something that I would recognise as human; anything else should be cleansed with fire.

The only there even is a race at all is because human cognitive and physical labor isn't yet entirely obsolete.

Again, you've expressed deep concern about what will happen to you if your medical knowledge becomes obsolete. What gives you any optimism at all about what happens after that? The options that I see (other than death) are: remaining competitive (in which case the race to the bottom remains), receiving charity from one of the few people with power, or somehow managing to get democratic control over these things. The latter two vary from okay-I-suppose to horrifying, dependent on how much compunction people feel about altering you to fit their values.

Uh, IDK about you, but there are plenty of video games that aren't just narrowly disguised Skinner Boxes out there, and there are plenty of parts of the internet out there that haven't degenerated to Tiktok levels. I'm the case of the latter, look, we're in one.

Yes, it's possible to avoid this stuff. But the vast majority of people don't: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201880/most-visited-websites-worldwide/. As far as games go, it's not actually too bad but still by far the biggest games are CS:GO, DOTA, Pubg and Apex (https://steamdb.info/charts/). All of these have lootboxes / ingame currencies AFAIK. More to the point, again, your desires are going to be rewritable. Why would I bother trying to appeal to you by making something you like when I can just make you like what I want?

I stress that the existence of humans is a luxury good in the future

But a luxury good for whom? You? Or whoever happens to feel like keeping you around?

there's no reason to assume the technology will stay extremely expensive.

I'm not thinking about the cost, I'm wondering what incentives whoever/whatever ends up on top has to let you and me keep stinking up the place. Maybe they'll think we add atmosphere but even so I doubt they'll want us cluttering up their private beaches - some goods are scarce by nature.

In the past, people have mostly obtained things via the charity of elites or through asserting their own power. The charity of elites is unstable and comes with strings attached. I do actually think that humans will be allowed to exist, I just doubt very much that they will be allowed anything resembling self-determination. Resignation in the face of this is something I understand but you genuinely seem to think more good than bad will come out of all of this and I don't understand that at all. Partly because futurist aesthetics stopped meaning anything to me once I saw the 90s/00s tech optimism sour.

It's anything related to the body or brain that worries me, especially things that can alter personality or desires, or things that lead to involution such as increased ability to ignore fatigue / burnout. I also want the output of the whole process to remain something that I would recognise as human; anything else should be cleansed with fire.

Well. I do think we ought to be careful when it comes to tinkering around with our biology or cognition. I'm just not so obsessed with safety that I wouldn't want to explore our options, unlike some who use it as a reason to ban it.

I want to be smarter, faster, stronger. If that can be achieved while remaining "recognizably human", that's great, but I don't really prioritize it that much. I went from being an embryo to well, this, and I am curious to see what humans can metamorphosize into.

If it makes you feel any better, I have no issues with people who want to stay much the same as they are, as long as they don't bother me.

Yes, it's possible to avoid this stuff. But the vast majority of people don't: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1201880/most-visited-websites-worldwide/. As far as games go, it's not actually too bad but still by far the biggest games are CS:GO, DOTA, Pubg and Apex (https://steamdb.info/charts/). All of these have lootboxes / ingame currencies AFAIK. More to the point, again, your desires are going to be rewritable. Why would I bother trying to appeal to you by making something you like when I can just make you like what I want?

The relevant question in both cases is are there non-degenerate alternatives that are easily accessible? That's obviously true for video games, and I see no reason to see why it wouldn't be the case for cybernetics.

To use the example of actual cybernetics, rudimentary as they might be, cochlear implants and pacemakers last a good chunk of time and are absolutely not designed to be forced into obsolescence.

Surely advanced manufacturing will be more accessible and not less, such that if you want to make a sturdy prosthetic with open source design and software, you can? There are already models out there.

But a luxury good for whom? You? Or whoever happens to feel like keeping you around?

The latter. I'm not so wealthy or connected that I expect to be in charge after the Singularity. Unlike @DaseindustriedLtd, I don't think the class of people in charge of modern AGI, such as Altman, are so evil or ruthless they'd let us all die.

If the AGI in question is misaligned, they're likely as fucked as we are.

I mean, I obviously want more agency than this in my own affairs, but I'm already a negligible influence in a democracy of a billion+ idiots. What difference does it make?

I'm not thinking about the cost, I'm wondering what incentives whoever/whatever ends up on top has to let you and me keep stinking up the place. Maybe they'll think we add atmosphere but even so I doubt they'll want us cluttering up their private beaches - some goods are scarce by nature.

I'm happy enough to live entirely in VR.

I don't expect the super wealthy to particularly care about this, since at this point a lot of the downsides of having poorer humans around (they have some degree of power, covet your wealth, might commit crime or try to kill you) become much more reasonable.

Elon Musk doesn't want to rub elbows with a SF hobo, he's likely cool with a random middle class or above human just vibing.

In the past, people have mostly obtained things via the charity of elites or through asserting their own power. The charity of elites is unstable and comes with strings attached. I do actually think that humans will be allowed to exist, I just doubt very much that they will be allowed anything resembling self-determination. Resignation in the face of this is something I understand but you genuinely seem to think more good than bad will come out of all of this and I don't understand that at all. Partly because futurist aesthetics stopped meaning anything to me once I saw the 90s/00s tech optimism sour.

Like I said, I don't really think I have all that much power or agency, for almost everyone here, if we vanished tomorrow the world would keep on spinning.

But what makes me mildly hopeful is that a lot of the reason for strife between humans, outright scarcity of material resources, will be largely nullified in the near future. Not gone, of course, we likely live in a limited and dying universe, but you won't need to kill for bread or women, and there's a lot of room to expand into for centuries, millennia or even millions of years hence.

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If the pessimistic scenario comes true, at least we'll have an opportunity for an exciting struggle against the big corpos for our immortal future. Some people say war gives humans purpose.

I’ll totally join the Motte resistance.

Certainly some of the highest status and highest agency men can create their own values, but what about the rest of us?

It depends on what you mean by creating your own values. Does it really require a particularly high amount of societal power or agency? Or at the minimum is it merely a cognitive act involving the recognition that the values you live by have no special authority other than that which you give by assenting to them? Perhaps this is just nihilism and creating your own values demands authorship of something new, but even that is nothing more than a cognitive act at the minimum.

Apologies for my snarky tone in the reply. Too much rum last night.

No worries! I'd prefer people to not hold back if they think I'm very wrong about something.

Or at the minimum is it merely a cognitive act involving the recognition that the values you live by have no special authority other than that which you give by assenting to them?

So very reductionist. Do you really think divulging and creating your own values and morality from scratch is so easy?

When something like the Bible was condensed from thousands of years of wisdom, distilled throughout the generations. Really?

There are two senses in which it may be easy, I can see why you would object to the second one I'll describe.

The first: that it doesn't require any special degree of status or societal power, is something I am quite confident in, and just saying this was the purpose of my comment (but of course I said more than that and invited people to discuss beyond that point). If you disagree with my particular suggestion of what creating your own values entails, I think you'd still agree that it's largely mental work which requires nothing more than clear thinking, research and effort.

I could have stopped at "is it merely a cognitive act(?).." to make the above point, but I went on because grasping at a specific definition is more interesting even if it brings me into territory I am less confident in. I think there is a sense in which creating your own values could be said to be easy even though it's only 'easy' in the sense that the hard won epistemological lessons of the enlightenment are 'easy'. That is to say, very easy to state, easy enough that a madman would think it sufficient to shout it in the marketplace or for us to feel shock at how ignorant the past was, but extremely difficult to discover in the first place, work out the implications of, and follow through consistently (e.g Nietzsche criticising atheists for barely even realising the implications of their position). A lot hinges on definition, there's a question as to whether creating your own values starts at the point of adopting a truly nihilistic perspective and rejecting all transcendental sources of value or whether it requires going above and beyond Nietzsche and actually developing a successful competitor to modern morality (the latter would be quite hard I admit). Can you create your own values and just do a bad job at it, or does actually doing it in the first place require some genius?

When something like the Bible was condensed from thousands of years of wisdom, distilled throughout the generations. Really?

The Bible wasn't written by philosophers or nihilists, the difficulty of the method used to produce it doesn't set the bar for other methods. A single man in a single lifetime is the minimum bar for a philosopher deriving values from what he sees as transcendantal sources, a single conversation can cast doubt on the ancient superstitions of Athens. As far as I can tell Nietzsche didn't set it any higher for nihilists.

I’ve often wondered if colonization was the ticket in the last several hundred years as a sort of purpose for at least some men. Go over the hill with a bunch of guys, build a new settlement and establish and build infrastructure and institutions that make the project self-sustaining. Such a purpose would be quite worthy, especially if it’s difficult and dangerous.

Yes, and it probably reduced the status anxiety of the colonists. A low-status man in England could go to India and be higher status than the natives at least.

This is one reason why 20th century colonialism is viewed so negatively even though it demonstrably improved standards of living in the colonized places. You can take a man's possessions, but steal his status and you have an enemy for life.

There weren't many low status men going to India except sailors and soldiers. Low status men can still join the army or navy today if they want an easy path.

But you are discounting the effect of knowing, every second of every day, that you are so much more advanced and better off - indeed so much better (in the eyes of the beholder) - than everyone else around you that you can treat them like pets or children. I doubt many men were enlisting specifically for a feeling of superiority, but being treated like a king is quite nice.

Colonization also just killed off a ton of men. British colonial troops died of disease in absurd numbers when posted anywhere south of France. Even without fighting any battles, colonialism drained off thousands of useless or aimless men every year.

It also provided a route to riches and fame for the lucky few. It's one of those high-risk high-reward strategies that down on their luck men have always gravitated towards throughout history. And honestly, it's a great trade for both society and those men, since they typically don't have much to offer otherwise.

Nowadays the only real high-risk high-reward strategy for ambitious men is to try and found a company, but that selects for such high IQ and conscientiousness that it's not a real strategy for any but the top percentage of the distribution.

What about gambling?

That works too, but society at large doesn't reward the successful gambler the same way they would reward the successful colonialist.

Before that it was the military, hunting mamoths and other ventures. Not all young men are going to be pacified. Some are going to get organized and start an adventure. It may be selling drugs, it may be joining a radical political movement or some other high risk high reward strategy. Crime is often portrayed as being caused by poverty when in reality a lot of crime isn't commited in order to pay for food and rent, it is committed for status. There is no dignity or way to meet attractive women for a loser guy. Join a gang and there is a risk of death and prison but also a chance of meeting hot women.

Join a gang and there is a risk of death and prison but also a chance of meeting hot women.

You can meet hot women by getting a decent job and going to bars. The allure of gangs is a brotherhood, fighting alongside men who will die to protect you, and vice versa. Even if the gangster life is often brutal, it's a far more real type of connection and community than the mainstream modern world offers.

I think what you’re forgetting is that gang recruits are teenaged boys who see an immediate route to status, money, and success with the opposite sex. This isn’t the fifties- no teenaged girls are dreaming about marrying engineers(and the sorts of boys who are recruited into gangs are not going to become engineers anyways). Gangbanging successfully is high status among these lads peers, including their opposite sex peers, and that’s what’s important for the discussion.

You can meet hot women by getting a decent job and going to bars.

I don't think this is a refutation. The existence of a more optimal approach to an end doesn't rule out the possibility that other more risky approaches are motivated by the same end.

Sure you can get a good job to get women instead of risking prison, but you might not have thought it through!

Much of this article is just mainstream pap, whipsawing from gleeful enjoyment about how women are better than men nowadays to lamenting how much men suck. But there is one part I want to highlight:

Perhaps most alarmingly, many of the visions of masculinity these figures are pushing are wildly antisocial, untethered to any idea of good.

Yes. If society has become anti-male or anti-masculine (and I would argue in large part it has), and "good" has come to refer to feminine virtues only, then worthwhile visions of masculinity will be anti-social. You cannot have an anti-masculine society without anti-social masculinity, unless you have no masculinity at all.

Much of this article is just mainstream pap, whipsawing from gleeful enjoyment about how women are better than men nowadays to lamenting how much men suck

Eh, from what I know of Emba her feminism is motivated entirely by the fact that she thinks women aren't happy with the current situation either.

If I were a cynic I'd say that this recent reactionary feminist wave is precisely about women and the easiest way for people like Emba and Louise Perry to distinguish themselves is where the current status quo shows serious cracks: how it handles men's problems (also mainly sex for women, going by her book topic)

My personal view on stories and articles like this is that it reflects a growing (if still subconscious) awareness that the Chesterton's fence of traditional masculinity was actually holding back something dangerous - and now that the fence has been torn down the bull is getting restless and realising his newfound freedom. There's now an urgent need to build a new fence (prosocial construction of masculinity in this metaphor) because there's a very high chance that the fence the bull decides to build will be substantially worse for women than what we've thrown out - just look at the bargain between the sexes in the rest of the world. The more sensitive (in the same sense that Nietzsche was sensitive, this isn't an insult) women are already starting to see what is taking shape among modern western male populations and it is absolutely something they should be scared of because there is a lot of potential for things to get very, very bad (for women). Sure, we might have tossed out the social guardrails on handling sexuality, but men can just look over at how Islam does it and see that things would actually be much, much better for them under a set of rules like that - and whatever else you can say about a brutal patriarchy that keeps women barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen, it is stable and incentivises both prosocial male behaviour and reproduction enough that those beliefs will absolutely have a voice in the deliberations to come if only by virtue of the sheer numbers of children they produce.

I agree with your theory that articles like this reflect a subconscious realisation of the traditonal masculinity/traditional sex roles were a social good that has now been destroyed.

I disagree with your assessment that the concern is some strict Sharia oppressive regime will rise up on women in response (Islam is often an unfair wipping boy for "bad" sexual relations but that's a topic for another time). Feminists will may say this but they are only framing the problem (incorrectly) in a way that appeals to their ideology - that women are perpetual victims at the hands of an ever present creeping patriarchy. I think you've just uncritically bought into the feminist framing. (As a side note, a "brutal patriarchy that keeps women barefoot and pregnant and in the kitchen" has never existed and will never exist except in the minds of fetishists and feminists who totally don't also fetishise it)

I think the actual (subconcious) concern is that women are slowly realising that a sexual libertine society isn't all what it was cracked up to be and the feminist promises of liberation were essentially a lie. That women actually prefer more traditional sexual norms including traditional masculinity (who'da thunk?). Not that that it's simply a less bad option, but there's genuine reasons to like traditional norms. So these it's essentially trying to backpeddle and recognise Chesterton's fence subconsciously as you say, they just can't articulate it because it would require going against feminist ideology, hence these really terrible feminist articles where they try and make it fit together and fail.

Edit: I read @Tanista's comment below after posting, his comment basically is a better articulation of what I was trying to say lol

I disagree with your assessment that the concern is some strict Sharia oppressive regime will rise up on women in response

I also don't think that something like that will show up, but I think that whatever does actually show up will be substantially closer to those more traditional and patriarchal systems than what we have today. Those ideas are floating around in the noosphere, and there's a decent chance that bits and pieces of them will be looted and reused in the construction of the masculinity that is to come.

Islam is often an unfair wipping boy for "bad" sexual relations but that's a topic for another time

Hey, to be perfectly honest I'm not really using Islam as a whipping boy - Islam may go too far in a few places for me, but I can see the appeal. It certainly works better at encouraging family formation than the modern west does.

I think you've just uncritically bought into the feminist framing.

I don't think so, but I can absolutely see how my post would have given you that impression, so my bad. That said, I do believe that feminism is going to become so hated that a lot of people will uncritically cast themselves as the patriarch/sexist that they have been told exists over and over again - i.e. that a lot of people will actually just uncritically buy the feminist framing and pick the side of the bad guys.

As for your third paragraph I largely agree - I just think that what you're describing is happening alongside what I've been describing rather than instead of it.

because there's a very high chance that the fence the bull decides to build will be substantially worse for women than what we've thrown out - just look at the bargain between the sexes in the rest of the world.

I don't really think there's a prospect of actual Handmaid's Tale-style RETVRNing. Feminists love to complain (or fantasize) about one, yes. But frankly I think it's part of a general tendency towards neuroticism and over-selling threats (especially in the Trump era) to justify their movement.

The failure states people like Perry claim as motivations are much more mundane: failures of the sexual revolution's model of male and female sexuality, failures in guiding women to make decisions that they seem to want to make but don't (e.g. having families), failures of omission like the absence of Good Men^(tm).

The regime isn't really at risk of collapse from male revolt; they've totally won. It's telling that the only reactionary turn allowed is that of feminists like Perry or males who share all feminist assumptions like Richard Reeves who spend their time begging to be taken seriously by feminists and will not go against their interests.

The reactionary turn is precisely because of the inherent downsides and contradictions of liberal feminism that smart feminists realize can't be written off by claiming there's some pocket of sexists we haven't eliminated yet. It's an attempted perestroika of an inherently (at least according to them) flawed system.

I don't really think there's a prospect of actual Handmaid's Tale-style RETVRNing.

I think that the current system of relations between the sexes is untenable and producing large numbers of frustrated young men with nothing tying them to society. I have my doubts about Handmaid's Tale manifesting in the real world (that series always struck me more as female pornography than a serious social position), but I think that sharia-style treatment is absolutely on the table. In a lot of western countries, immigration means that there are decently sized populations of people actually living that culture, right now.

The failure states people like Perry claim as motivations are much more mundane

Who? I have no idea who this person is and I can't see any links to her work, so I'm not going to talk about her or her positions at all.

The regime isn't really at risk of collapse from male revolt; they've totally won.

Hard disagree - the cathedral is currently in serious disarray and is openly failing in new and exciting ways every single day. There are serious problems with the government of the west as it is currently constituted, and these doctrines and ideas have been spreading through the population like wildfire. Prosocial illusions about femininity have been largely destroyed and women are unhappier than ever, even as male dysfunction finally grows noticeable enough that people are talking about it. The regime absolutely has not won - they have a rapidly failing grip on society that is forced to grow more nakedly authoritarian and less credible as time goes on. If that's what counts as winning, I'm curious as to what defeat looks like.

It's telling that the only reactionary turn allowed

Allowed? Who said the regime has the ability to disallow anything? Schoolteachers are currently having to deal with the fact that messages running completely counter to their ideas are running rampant in schools. The reaction is building and these are the early signs of what is coming down the pipe. This isn't a case of perestroika so much as people inside the system finally noticing that the alarm bells are ringing, and trying to communicate that from inside a system which makes even talking about this kind of failure grounds for social ostracism and shaming.

I think that the current system of relations between the sexes is untenable and producing large numbers of frustrated young men with nothing tying them to society.

True. Luckily for them it's an evolutionarily novel environment and the most frustrated men are basically poisoned by fast food and the internet.

Those men are disappearing into video games and porn and, even if they weren't, simply don't have the psychological and physical profile for rebellion (incels are well overrepresented in traits like depression and low internal locus of control).

There ARE roving bands of men (or close enough) but that just seems to be due to lax law enforcement (and, tbh, I doubt low-IQ criminals are as sexually frustrated. From what I know it's the opposite; they tend to have higher partner counts).

Who? I have no idea who this person is and I can't see any links to her work, so I'm not going to talk about her or her positions at all.

Louise Perry, who has also written a book attacking liberal feminism and the sexual revolution. In my head women like her and Emba are of a class.

Hard disagree - the cathedral is currently in serious disarray and is openly failing in new and exciting ways every single day. There are serious problems with the government of the west as it is currently constituted, and these doctrines and ideas have been spreading through the population like wildfire. Prosocial illusions about femininity have been largely destroyed and women are unhappier than ever, even as male dysfunction finally grows noticeable enough that people are talking about it. The regime absolutely has not won - they have a rapidly failing grip on society that is forced to grow more nakedly authoritarian and less credible as time goes on. If that's what counts as winning, I'm curious as to what defeat looks like.

All of this is true. And yet dissent is not manifesting in any sort of constructive alternative. Young men are unhappy, they either buy into the prog line in some way or dig into a variety of reactionary content creators playing whack-a-mole with the censors. Women are unhappy, they either get increasingly desperate talks on how misogyny is still the problem or maybe they read works like Emba's and Perry's that offer critique but no solution. Anything that even looks vaguely constructive is written off as misogynist or unviable.

It's a form of "feminist realism": complaining about capitalism means nothing if no one can actually conceive of or execute a replacement vision. Socialists can talk all they want about the system being this close to collapse, it clings on.

Those men are disappearing into video games and porn and, even if they weren't, simply don't have the psychological and physical profile for rebellion (incels are well overrepresented in traits like depression and low internal locus of control).

"Incels" existed in every generation and always have, but they're not really who I'm talking about. There are a lot of more average men who are now falling through the cracks and failing to start, who now often get clumped in with the actual incels (I don't pay much attention to incel vocabulary, but I suppose the actual incels I'm talking about would be what they call "trucels"). They're distinctly aware that something is wrong, and there's a lot of anger motivating them too. They're already a significant political force in Korea and were widely considered to have played a key role in their recent elections, for instance. Furthermore, they don't actually need to have the ability or inclination to rebel - their existence as a large group means that the individuals who actually do rebel or work against the system can count on them as allies in exchange for giving them some of what they want. The "incels" in Korea didn't rebel - but they (supposedly) won the election for the candidate who promised to give them some of what they want.

On the other hand, I agree that the roving bands of men are distinct from this phenomenon - in my view those are the nascent warbands that show up on the periphery of dying empires very consistently throughout history.

Perry

She doesn't seem like she has a particularly interesting perspective from what I've seen here, but if you have an actual good article I can read without giving her money I'd be interested.

All of this is true. And yet dissent is not manifesting in any sort of constructive alternative.

"It's true that the warning lights are on and weird noises are coming from the engine, but the engine hasn't actually stopped so there's no problem." These are the early warning signs of impending trouble, and those constructive alternatives are largely crushed in their formative stages because of the threat they represent to the current elite and social order. While a bunch of dudes noticing that the official messaging in their culture regarding women is all completely false and makes you less successful if you listen to and internalise it isn't really a big problem by itself, there's an idea floating around rationalist circles that makes the issue a bit clearer - that lies are contagious. Once the ostensibly prosocial illusions regarding women evaporate, the people who notice this are going to start seeing all the other little lies and deceptions that modern industrial western societies rely on, and when those lies are gone we're going to be in for some very interesting times. We're now seeing reports from school teachers that they have to stage special interventions because boys are sharing Andrew Tate content - https://www.newsweek.com/andrew-tate-teacher-school-misogyny-1783709 Boys are increasingly failing to respect or respond to conventional messaging, and political polarisation between them and girls is increasing.

Anything that even looks vaguely constructive is written off as misogynist or unviable.

Why include the "looks" qualifier? Any constructive or positive response to the system is labelled as misogynist and squashed by the arms of the Cathedral, and this will continue until well after the point at which people stop letting "misogynist" as a slur have any impact on them or their behaviour. The system may be clinging on, but at the same time my contention is not that it is close to collapse - it is collapsing around us as we speak, right now.

"Incels" existed in every generation and always have, but they're not really who I'm talking about. There are a lot of more average men who are now falling through the cracks and failing to start, who now often get clumped in with the actual incels

That sounds like a description of modern incels (obviously we don't care that much about the floor of men who'd just never reproduce, we care that the number seems to be growing....)

But let's say we mean some people who haven't totally blackpilled themselves. Sure. It's a more viable demographic. But I wonder to what degree they aren't subject to similar problems like obesity. After all, what did they fail to start? School sports and all those other physical virtues?

She doesn't seem like she has a particularly interesting perspective from what I've seen here

I read her book, and I more or less agree tbh

"It's true that the warning lights are on and weird noises are coming from the engine, but the engine hasn't actually stopped so there's no problem."

No, I think you're thinking of the late USSR or Impeprial China and I'm thinking about a random awful African country.

Like, both have problems. But one collapsed and was replaced by a new, perhaps more viable model. The other just continues to dwell (or spiral) in a low-level equilibrium with no end in sight.

That's how I see it. Bad regimes and systems can persist for a long time without a real counter. When we're talking about some of the richest and most mature democracies with ever increasing government-corporate control of the digital infrastructure and their visible testing of means of curbing revolt (e.g. the attack against the bank accounts of trucker protestors)...

The public is way too divided and been trained to both hate each other and feel fatalist about a lot of this. They've already proven that plenty of them are for authoritarian tactics so long as it's framed correctly.

This is without even getting into more speculative (though unfortunately less speculative every day) uses of autonomous tech to put down prole revolts without even depending on the usual "class traitors" that make up the thin blue line.

We're now seeing reports from school teachers that they have to stage special interventions because boys are sharing Andrew Tate content

The psychological fragility and neuroticism of the average leftist activist or booster doesn't mean the system is won't strike back. Quite the opposite

The system has its problems yes, but it uses panics like Andrew Tate to justify more control.

You point out that they're holding interventions with teenage boys. I'd note that they moved to curtail his influence online and he's literally on trial right now... In the meantime sixty different "experts" are probably calling for increased intervention against "misinformation" and "radicalism" and the social media sites are probably tuning their systems (we now know they have a lot of coordination with the government) to make sure it never happens again.

Why include the "looks" qualifier?

To emphasize the totality and...arbitrariness? A better word is escaping me, but the image that comes to mind is a scared cop shooting anything that moves

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I'm surprised to find I agree with you. Society has become feminized in the extreme, to the point where even institutions that have been male-only for hundreds of years are bowing under the pressure.

The most pernicious thing about this feminization is that it's so far outside the Overton window to even talk in these terms, that most masculine projects and fraternal organizations are dead on arrival. Any mainstream politician talking about helping men, like the Obama example above, gets eviscerated by the feminist movement immediately.

I know it's passe to bring up social media all the time, but I also think it's an excellent example of how so much of our energy is spent in the social realm, traditionally dominated by women, rather than the masculine realm of conquering nature. Imagine what we could've accomplished if we could capture all the capital, labor, and ingenuity that went into social media and shift it into something like materials science, or space exploration, or energy infrastructure, or artificial intelligence, or any other field that has a more direct impact on the world.

Anyway, I agree that society will have to learn to accept and work for men, or we are in for dark times ahead.

Without some larger mission, most men aren't going to be motivated whatsoever. Men need a reason to exist.

For the vast majority of human history the vast majority of men (and women) have been beasts of burden. All this stuff about men needing adventure or heroism elides the fact that only a tiny minority of men have ever been heroes or adventurers. Working as a cashier at Walgreens is not significantly more monotonous or miserable than year-round farmwork.

What has changed significantly in the last century or two for men is that simply surviving childhood and not being a criminal or an imbecile is no longer enough to guarantee a wife and kids. To the extent men used to have any kind of higher “purpose” or “mission” I guess it was that. It’s not like (99% of) premoderns were sitting around philosophizing about Faith and transcendental values. This is not because of feminism or liberalism or atheism (as can be seen by the same issues developing in countries much more conservative than the west) but pretty straightforwardly a consequence of modern industrial civilization, which means individual women no longer have to rely on individual men for economic and physical security. When Jane doesn’t have to choose between starvation and prostitution on the one hand and marrying John on the other, she’s not going to marry John.

Physical and economic security is increasingly provided by ever-smaller groups of ‘specialists’ who keep the lights on and the barbarians out (and who may be mostly men, but are certainly not most men). That goes for all of us of course, which is why nobody knows how to fight or farm anymore.

No amount of social engineering, whether right-wing fantasies of restoring traditional masculinity, or left-wing ideas of building a new positive masculinity or whatever, is going to change that. There’s no cosmic law that says there has to be a solution.

When Jane doesn’t have to choose between starvation and prostitution on the one hand and marrying John on the other, she’s not going to marry John.

I'm unsure how historically accurate this most extreme formulation is, but I'm sure that in a world where manual labor meant a whole lot more, something like this probably happened in some capacity. I still don't understand why people say it.

I've seen this statement a lot. I've seen it said in many ways by many different kinds of people across many different hues and shades of culture and politics. I've heard it said in a few different tones, largely ranging from triumphant to bemused—which isn't the way I would say it if I thought it were true and a major cause of modern trends.

The first thing I think when I see it is that I wonder what the endgame is supposed to be. I think that people who have fun saying it usually intend it as some kind of polemic call to men to DO BETTER. I can't help but notice that this often comes coincident with a political framework that generally rejects not just the morality but the pragmatic efficacy of such a posture—but I suppose that by itself doesn't necessarily prove anything. I have an even harder time understanding people who say it with a rightward perspective. How exactly are we supposed to have healthy family formation in a future where this is true? There does seem to be a handful of small, right-facing factions that seem to recognize this contradiction to the detriment of modernity and its consequences, but funny enough I don't usually see those types saying this sort of thing. It's usually people like JBP et al and the occasional cathposter. I'm not really sure what the point is supposed to be when they say it, or if they fully realize the implications for the future when they do.

It's difficult to fully describe the degree to which this statement inflames my passions. What I really want to say is something like "wow, with all this porn and sex dolls, women can't just coast into success with men just by having a moist hole anymore"—but as we all know, the rhetorical switcheroo never works. Nobody is going to stop and think about the myriad ways such a statement would butcher women's dignity as a class of human being—nobody is going to think about how such a statement utterly de-romanticizes women's value as partner and mate, or how it faithlessly summarizes women's unique sacrifices that in part brought us to where we are today before cynically discarding it like a wet torch—and if they do, they're never going to relate any of it back to what they just got done saying about men. They're just gonna call you a hater and move on.

Now, I'm not the kind of man who is seriously deficient in hole moistness earning power, but I don't care. The simple fact that this the way my civilization views my caste makes me worry not that it isn't reproducing. The world should be inherited by men and women who actually love each other.

The first thing I think when I see it is that I wonder what the endgame is supposed to be. I think that people who have fun saying it usually intend it as some kind of polemic call to men to DO BETTER. I can't help but notice that this often comes coincident with a political framework that generally rejects not just the morality but the pragmatic efficacy of such a posture—but I suppose that by itself doesn't necessarily prove anything. I have an even harder time understanding people who say it with a rightward perspective.

Well I don't mean it in a smug "sucks to be a man!" way. And I consider myself a liberal so I don't mean it in a twitter fash "women should be property!" way. It just seems to me to be the case.

How exactly are we supposed to have healthy family formation in a future where this is true?

We're probably not. But I don't mourn its loss. I don't think the family is some beautiful, mystical union handed down by a beneficent God--it was a jury-rigged institution that persisted because it was the only apparent way to keep civilization from imploding, and was at least tolerable for a plurality of people. My personal experience is that huge numbers of couples, possibly an outright majority, end up resenting each other. I see little reason to think it was different in the past. Modernity is unpleasant in a lot of ways, including the one we're talking about, but it's far from clear to me that it's worse than what it supplanted. "RETVRN to coupling with someone who doesn't really like you all that much but will put up with you and raise a couple of kids" doesn't exactly inspire me. I guess it's 'healthy' insofar as it reproduced the status quo, but was the status quo all that worth reproducing? If that's the best we can aspire to, we might as well just blow the whole thing up.

What I really want to say is something like "wow, with all this porn and sex dolls, women can't just coast into success with men just by having a moist hole anymore"

Well you've phrased it crudely but is it not empirically the case that many men are replacing real-life relationships with porn? And if we really do get hyper-realistic AI companions in the near future, well...

Now maybe this is all just me. I can't relate to anything in the article OP posted because. Maybe because I don't consider myself particularly masculine, so it has never been a source of angst for me. I have never felt this drive for purpose and achievement that is apparently endemic to modern young men. I don't have the yearning for male spaces or brotherhood. I have never once in my life felt the urge to be a husband or a father. I feel less than no desire to ever be anyone's provider and protector, and the relationships I've been in, romantic and platonic, have shown me that the fastest way to make me to resent somebody is to be responsible for their wellbeing, material or emotional.

"RETVRN to coupling with someone who doesn't really like you all that much but will put up with you and raise a couple of kids"

I mean...for a lot of guys, isn't this a pretty good deal or what they honestly already have? I've known: skilled blue collar workers in relationships with 450lb women that need canes to walk and get winded walking a hundred yards, women in relationships with guys they'd divorce if they had had jobs and hadn't chosen homemaking, guys who chose to remain married to women that tried to strangle their 10-year-old child after the child and their mom had an argument.

That being said: it is probably a good thing that only the best/most adapted/most graceful of men get to have families and children; the idea that patriarchy was a sheltered workshop for low-value men doesn't sound too unreasonable.

I largely agree but, but I am not sure it is a given. There is nothing requiring the state to subsidize single women to the extent it does. Strong independent women who don't need no man do infact need massive bailouts from the tax payer. Single mothers get more government handouts and benefit from a plethora of social programs. If taxes were lowered and schools instead required tuition and if medical care was financed entirely privately single motherhood would become far less attractive. Even in terms of their jobs single women often work in tax payer professions often providing services to themselves. For example a single mother might work as a teacher thereby providing free child care services to other single mothers. Men who don't sleep with these ladies pay.

If there is a way that this unravels, it is the services deteriorating to the point that relying on them in order to be a strong independent women doesn't work.

For example a single mother might work as a teacher thereby providing free child care services to other single mothers.

I think that is one of the stupidest things I have read on the Internet, and I've read a lot of stupid things.

Is the education system in part a childcare system? Yes, unfortunately, but it's also in part a result of the kind of "home-making is not real work, only waged labour is valuable, get women into the workforce for the sake of the economy" attitude going on here. So if you have both parents out of the house all day working, and you have minor children, those children have to be taken care of by somebody.

But the real pith here is "providing free child care services to other single mothers".

Gosh, I had no idea children of married couples were not permitted to attend school in the USA! And that divorced and bereaved parents were also barred, because only women with no spouses ever could have their children attending free day care school!

God knows, I'm a social conservative who does not approve of the explosion in single parenting, and even I think this is a dumb statement of how things are. Yes, let's not have single mothers working as teachers, the whores and hussies! They're not doing a job, they're only in it to help out the other whores and hussies!

The issue is that their lifestyle is heavily subsidized. A married couple generally pays far more in taxes than a single mother. Single motherhood is only possible due to state sponsored services making it viable. If people had to carry the weight of the children they had themselves there would be far fewer single mothers. In countries where having a child by yourself isn't feasible far fewer people have children by themselves. Instead of children spending time with their parents they are institutionalized far more than needed. Parents often do a far better job at teaching small children than schools do.

Strong independent women who don't need no man do infact need massive bailouts from the tax payer.

And people argue in favor of them receiving more

What has changed significantly in the last century or two for men is that simply surviving childhood and not being a criminal or an imbecile is no longer enough to guarantee a wife and kids.

On the contrary, unmarried medieval laymen were commonplace, mostly due to poverty. And of course in other societies that practiced polygamy openly- do you think the bottom 40-50% of men were reproducing?

unmarried medieval laymen were commonplace, mostly due to poverty. And of course in other societies that practiced polygamy openly

Which historical investigations can we read on this? Which medieval societies and their laymen, which polygamist societies?

It’s not like (99% of) premoderns were sitting around philosophizing about Faith and transcendental values.

Here's where I disagree. If you read history, you'll find that religion was extremely central to premoderns' conceptions of the world. I agree that industrial society is what did it in, and in some cases it was very dramatic. Take the worldview described in The Pervasive World-View: Religion in Pre-Modern Britain:

The medieval period is generally regarded as one of outstanding achieve- ment in the history of religion. It is looked upon as an age of universal faith, when western Christendom flourished, secure in its beliefs and united under the authority of the supra-national papacy. An age in which long strides were taken in the outward organisation of the Church into provinces, dioceses, and parishes; one which raised awe-inspiring cathedrals, monasteries and many parish churches, still surviving among us as monuments to the beliefs and aspirations of medieval men and women.

An age which witnessed the creation of an ordered body of Canon Law and its general acceptance and enforcement; and which saw the construction of a superb intellectual synthesis combining the testi- mony of faith and reason and the enthronement of theology as the queen of all knowledge. An age when the Church dominated the content and conduct of education in the universities, grammar schools and other institutions. An age which looked to the Church as the creatrix and nurse of the crowning achievements of art and civilization.

Religion is often also the centerpiece of rebellions:

Furthermore, we can note that religion was sufficiently important to the common people not only to be supported implicitly by their acceptance of the conventions of the church but also to figure in a variety of ways in their periodic rebellions against the established order. Most uprisings of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries had at their core grievances over changes in the organization of agriculture but many also included ele- ments of religious dissent

For an idea of what people thought about religion and superstition day to day:

In showing the extent to which pre-Christian super- stitions and magical practices continued alongside orthodox Christianity, Thomas amply illustrates the importance of those superstitions. Church officials may have despaired at the perversions of their teachings peddled by the laity but for the secularization thesis what matters is that superstition was widespread and effective. Horoscopes were read, not just as 'a bit of fun' but as a serious guide to social action. Spells were cast to ward off dangers. Amulets were worn as protection against ailments. Holy relics were venerated and used as sources of magical powers. Belief in the Devil was strong and widespread, as was the corresponding belief that the church had the power to protect against evil: 'People wanted their houses blessed, their fields blessed, their food blessed, their weapons blessed...

I hope this shows that even right in pre-modernity, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Religious worldviews and superstition were still going quite strong. We could expect that before the change of the industrial revolution these religious views were even more closely held.

To you point about mate selection:

When Jane doesn’t have to choose between starvation and prostitution on the one hand and marrying John on the other, she’s not going to marry John.

I get so tired of evolutionary psychologists reducing everything to who gets to mate with whom. Clearly humans have a lot more going on than just trying to get their rocks off, and while the evo psych mating lens can be useful, it is not something which can explain away the whole of human experience.

Do you truly believe you can reduce the tens of thousands of years humans have spent contemplating God, building great works, fighting massive wars, and the general whole of human experience down to someone's sexual market value? If so, I think the inferential distance between us may be too far to easily bridge.

If you read history, you'll find that religion was extremely central to premoderns' conceptions of the world.

Definitely, but I think in a mostly non-transcendental way.

Horoscopes were read, not just as 'a bit of fun' but as a serious guide to social action. Spells were cast to ward off dangers. Amulets were worn as protection against ailments. Holy relics were venerated and used as sources of magical powers. Belief in the Devil was strong and widespread, as was the corresponding belief that the church had the power to protect against evil: 'People wanted their houses blessed, their fields blessed, their food blessed, their weapons blessed...

Religion was and is for most people, a very functional and indeed, material thing.

As for theology, canon law, universities—very much minority affairs.

Do you truly believe you can reduce the tens of thousands of years humans have spent contemplating God, building great works, fighting massive wars, and the general whole of human experience down to someone's sexual market value?

No, but I think the vast majority of people never did any of those things. I think evopsych is often silly just-so stories, but it seems undeniable humans are largely driven by sex.

I agree that religion was de jure central to life for most of human history, but it's not clear to what extent its details actually made a difference. Certainly they do matter a lot in some contexts. But most of the things that you say they're central to, such as rebellions, schools, and marriage all existed before and after any given religion and, I claim, mostly don't depend on the details of religious texts.

As for "who gets to mate with whom", that's what the OP was discussing.

But most of the things that you say they're central to, such as rebellions, schools, and marriage all existed before and after any given religion and, I claim, mostly don't depend on the details of religious texts.

Really? I would argue that religion is the central piece that made things like rebellions, schools and marriages even possible. Sure you can take a purely materialist view and say they exist separately, but how did we humans manage to rise out of prehistory to even create a functioning society? How did we get along without killing each other? Where did the idea of marriage, or the idea of teaching your descendants important truths, or the idea that a sovereign is beholden to a higher power, even come from?

All of these things have their roots in religion.

All of these things happen all the time without religion, and also happen to a lesser extent amongst animals. And even sovereigns notionally beholden to god didn't keep power long without armies.

All of these things happen all the time without religion

Sure they happen without explicit religion, but could they happen without the framework religion provided? If people want to bring in evo psych arguments, we're talking an incredibly short timeline for evolutionary situations.

Yes, they happen without the framework religion provides all the time in the animal world, where we see pair bonding, leaders, and parents teaching children. I agree that religions shaped these institutions in the human world to some extent, but I claim that since these behaviors and institutions can clearly survive on their own merits, something like them would have arisen even if early humans somehow weren't religious.

That is a good point. Do you not think religion plays an important social role?

How do gangs of monkeys and bands of apes stay together?

How do some animals regularly pair bond for life?

While religion may have once been a social lubricant, now it's sand in the gears.

If that’s the case, why can’t we create secular ideologies that function as well as religions created thousands of years ago?

You are, I assume, aware of the centuries of butchery produced by the European Wars Of Religion, all of which were fought (at least nominally) about Christianity? And the similarly brutal sectarian conflicts produced by the various offshoots of Islam? Note that I’m not downplaying any of the good and noble results produced by these religions; you have to take the bad with the good. It’s not remotely clear to me that, in terms of per capita, fascism and communism produced worse or bloodier results than their religious counterpart ideologies.

It’s not remotely clear to me that, in terms of per capita, fascism and communism produced worse or bloodier results than their religious counterpart ideologies.

Oh don't get me wrong, it's all bloody as hell. The reason I keep pushing for religion is that I think it's bloody for a reason. It's bloody and awful because there is a there there. Because religion speaks to something fundamental, that humans cannot live without.

providing for their families, but also by caring for them emotionally. By being a strong, stable presence, but also by showing vulnerability. By teaching their sons and daughters to honor women — and by demonstrating that behavior themselves.

Was the article edited after publishing? I can't find this quote in the article. I was going to write a comment criticising the article but I would rather make sure we're all on the same page with the article first.

Ahh yes thank you, here is the correct quote:

by providing for their families and broader society, by protecting their tribe and others, and by successfully procreating.

I've edited the post to reflect the change.

Unfortunately it looks like GPT-4's decreasing capability strikes again. I use it to help rewrite and catch grammatical errors etc. It used to leave quotes alone, but looks like now it is arbitrarily editing them.

I am excited for when we work out the kinks in RLHF and can get these tools to work like GPT-4 did when it first came out!

The entire point of RLHF is to prevent text generation AIs from working like they did when they first came out.

:(

Religiosity is a personality trait like agreeableness or conscientiousness, and adopting atheism doesn't actually change your personality in that dimension, it just channels it through other causes, like atheism itself or communism or nationalism. Although I now reject Yahweh-ism, I don't feel I have become less religious in character. That inclination for religiosity is channeled through other causes. I also don't think "religiosity" is a personality defect that can or should be entirely crowded out by rationalism, it inspires people to do great things often manifests as self-sacrifice for a group cause.

I also don't think Nietzsche's intention was for all men to ascend to godhood, but for an extremely small number of worthy to do so and for the rest to be good followers. The former interpretation leads to the chaotic incompetence of everyone wanting to be a leader but nobody a follower, which is what you see today with Online Influencers fostering their own small communities but otherwise not cohering men together in a broader Religion. This also manifests in "Beta-male" being universally interpreted as an insult, whereas great men are nothing without worthy Beta-males. What would Napoleon have achieved if all of his followers fancied themselves as Alpha and thought it was some humiliation to be a loyal follower?

I think the solution is to consciously develop a new non-theistic Religion that doesn't rely on superstition or demand belief in miracles. Adherence to this religion should sacralize civilizational achievement, the Faustian spirit, and social conventions that steer society in a eugenic direction. It should oppose those who compromise these objectives with false gods and a false morality.

When you're on your deathbed, where will you look for comfort? What force or being or god will let you face your own death without flinching? What water will purify you?

Although I no longer believe in spiritual afterlife, I believe in more than ever a physical afterlife. I will look towards my children, who are my life after my death, a physical projection of my blood and spirit. Any successor-religion to Yahweh-ism should likewise elevate eternal life not as a matter of personal salvation, but group survival and thriving.

I also don't think Nietzsche's intention was for all men to ascend to godhood

You're on solid ground here because he actually explicitly says as much multiple times and in multiple places.

EVERY elevation of the type "man," has hitherto been the work of an aristocratic society and so it will always be--a society believing in a long scale of gradations of rank and differences of worth among human beings, and requiring slavery in some form or other. Without the PATHOS OF DISTANCE, such as grows out of the incarnated difference of classes, out of the constant out-looking and down-looking of the ruling caste on subordinates and instruments, and out of their equally constant practice of obeying and commanding, of keeping down and keeping at a distance--that other more mysterious pathos could never have arisen, the longing for an ever new widening of distance within the soul itself, the formation of ever higher, rarer, further, more extended, more comprehensive states, in short, just the elevation of the type "man," the continued "self-surmounting of man," to use a moral formula in a supermoral sense. To be sure, one must not resign oneself to any humanitarian illusions about the history of the origin of an aristocratic society (that is to say, of the preliminary condition for the elevation of the type "man"): the truth is hard. Let us acknowledge unprejudicedly how every higher civilization hitherto has ORIGINATED! Men with a still natural nature, barbarians in every terrible sense of the word, men of prey, still in possession of unbroken strength of will and desire for power, threw themselves upon weaker, more moral, more peaceful races (perhaps trading or cattle-rearing communities), or upon old mellow civilizations in which the final vital force was flickering out in brilliant fireworks of wit and depravity. At the commencement, the noble caste was always the barbarian caste: their superiority did not consist first of all in their physical, but in their psychical power--they were more COMPLETE men (which at every point also implies the same as "more complete beasts").

consciously develop a new non-theistic Religion that doesn't rely on superstition or demand belief in miracles. Adherence to this religion should sacralize civilizational achievement, the Faustian spirit, and social conventions that steer society in a eugenic direction. It should oppose those who compromise these objectives with false gods and a false morality.

A modern Confucianism? That sounds interesting; hopefully we might get something like this in a century or two.

It's hilarious to me that this is what autopopulated when I hit "reply".

Quokka

"A modern confucianism" doesn't seem like a good description of what we're looking at. Instead the middle classes of most developed countries are experiencing strong selection pressures towards dogmatism, xenophobia and belief in the supernatural. The future secular population of developed countries doesn't look like Jordan Peterson. It looks like the whackos who think they're witches.

It looks like the whackos who think they're witches.

The stereotype about them is they're childless and eaten by their cats when they die, so that seems kinda unlikely.

That may be the stereotype, but there’s no good evidence they have a fertility rate much lower than the general blue tribe. On the other hand we know that religious fertility rates remain much higher than secular ones and that apostates are both a major reason the secular population is close to demographically stable and also mostly made up of the kind of ‘spiritual but not religious’ people who believe in all kinds of superstitions and are very likely to get into weird magic.

I think the solution is to consciously develop a new non-theistic Religion that doesn't rely on superstition or demand belief in miracles.

This is certainly a solution, but the massive failures, predicted by Nietszche actually, tend to end in massive waves of blood drenching the world. It's happened twice already, and I think most modern leaders are understandable highly cautious when it comes to any sort of 'non-theistic Religion.'

Adherence to this religion should sacralize civilizational achievement, the Faustian spirit, and social conventions that steer society in a eugenic direction.

I think you're misunderstanding one of the main draws of religion for those you deem have high religiosity. Religion and true Gods are supposed to give us something to map onto concepts that are difficult for humans to wrap their minds around. A worthy God (or pantheon) must embody concepts like bargaining with the future, cleansing the people of sin, helping people work together, and as you say steer people towards good values. (or a eugenic direction in your desacralized wording.)

These processes tend to develop over the aeons as a process of cultural evolution, and I'm highly doubtful that we can just manufacture that type of religion by brute forcing it with a scientific mindset. Similar to how brute forcing government has tended to go quite poorly.

Recently I'm leaning more towards the idea of broadening our understanding of truth and fact. Right now your main contention is that religion 'demands belief in miracles.' What if we could separate our understanding of religion from science, and see it through an experiential lense.

For instance, even if miracles don't exist in an objective, empirical sense, they do absolutely exist in an experiential sense. People can touch the divine, and with psychedelics and/or religious ritual we can produce that feeling of a miracle reliably. Just because the phenomenon is taking place inside someone's conscious experience doesn't make it less real than something happening in the material world.

In a way consciousness comes before the material world, because without consciousness how would any of our concepts of time, space, size, or structure even exist? There would be no reason to have any of these concepts, the universe would just be billiard balls of different sizes bouncing around endlessly with no rhyme or reason.

This is certainly a solution, but the massive failures, predicted by Nietszche actually, tend to end in massive waves of blood drenching the world. It's happened twice already, and I think most modern leaders are understandable highly cautious when it comes to any sort of 'non-theistic Religion.'

It has happened many, many times, not just twice- the dividing lines between Ideology and Religion are more of an illusion than a reality.

I think most modern leaders are understandable highly cautious when it comes to any sort of 'non-theistic Religion.'

No they are not, they are highly cautious about defending their own non-theistic Religion, which we call "wokeness". Their core narrative is that their own non-theistic Religion is the One and True Just morality, and heretics have only ever covered the world in blood while their own ideology has liberated the masses. It's a highly convenient narrative, but it isn't true and their bloodlust against heretics is not driven by caution against non-theistic Religion, it's driven by fanaticism towards their own non-theistic Religion.

Religion and true Gods are supposed to give us something to map onto concepts that are difficult for humans to wrap their minds around. A worthy God (or pantheon) must embody concepts like bargaining with the future, cleansing the people of sin, helping people work together, and as you say steer people towards good values. (or a eugenic direction in your desacralized wording.)

I agree, but isn't this exactly what Marvel Comics does? Heroes in that canon achieve this same influence without demanding the audience believes the literal truth of the myths they portray. This was also similar to the Roman system, where there was certainly superstition among the laity but the essence of the Religion itself was civic ritual rather than a personal salvation cult based on belief in the literal truth of the myth of a dying-and-rising god. Abrahamic religion is is fairly unique in this regard in terms of demanding belief in the literal truth of the claimed miracles, and it did not appear to be a feature of European religious practice pre-Christianity.

The European gods were like tribal mascots, held dearly, but more like Comic-con on steroids than mass belief in the actual, literal resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Right now your main contention is that religion 'demands belief in miracles.' What if we could separate our understanding of religion from science, and see it through an experiential lense.

Yahwehism demands belief in the literal truth of the miracles it claims, but that is not a necessary feature of a religion per se. That is my point. If I were to "design a religion" and somehow use AI or something to meme it into existence, I wouldn't choose to make that a feature of my religion because it has proven to be vulnerable/killed by rationalism and enlightenment thinking.

There of course is the prospect, the likelihood, that all religion has always been consciously designed by a cultural elite in order to invoke a psychological effect in intended flocks. This is how Plato saw the Greek religion, and how Nietzsche saw Christian religion as well.

Nietzsche viewed the Death of God as an existential crisis, certainly, but he still welcomed it because he viewed it as a sink or swim moment for humanity. It's a moral crisis but it's also an opportunity for transcendence.


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