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I see that neither side of the culture war right now focuses on the positive, on something beautiful. Both sides see themselves as righteous oppressed victims fighting against the evil empire of the other side, but for both it is less a Star Wars vision than a Terminator vision. War machines running over skulls at night-time, death and lasers. The culture war is bleak and stark, it has no poetry, no romance. It is a grim attrition war, trenches and minor offensives but few large breakthroughs if by breakthroughs one means reaching one's opponent and convincing him of something. Where are the creative songbirds of thought and word who would transcend this opposition and maybe get both sides to become aware that both are equally stuck in the human condition? Has rhetoric truly reached the limits of its potential power? I have so rarely seen anyone change his mind about anything more than minor details.
It is all so tiresome. Maybe it is possible to move in some orthogonal direction and flank this whole conflict from a side that has the breath of fresh air behind it?
Wrote a big comment, and then I refreshed like an idiot and lost it all. Why do I never learn. use an offline text editor.
tl;dr: Doomerism is not culture war, it is THE culture. Life is improving for many, but it is in the middle tier of Maslow's pyramid. We've dismantled the social structures that enabled people to seek the top 3 needs on Maslow's pyramid. Doomerism is people saying, "What's the point of getting all these lower-tier Maslow's needs met so much harder, if that means giving up on the top 3 needs on the pyramid."
p.s: I went into a side rant on housing prices/urbanism/density/social-fabric-of-a-build-environment how it all relates directly to this issue. But, I am the definition of a single issue broken record. So, take it as you will.
I like this framing of it.
Even if Maslow's hierarchy isn't strictly scientific I bet most people would generally agree that despite living in a world of material abundance, there is a dearth of purpose, of higher calling, 'meaning,' or actual prestige to be found. So the material abundance makes us comfortable but fails to fulfill our utility function, and our leaders have ceased to be inspirational and aspirational and the entire point of becoming wealthy seems to have become the end in itself.
At least in a world where you're not 100% certain where your next meal is coming from, you can focus on the 'purpose' of acquiring food to keep on living, which is to say you have a reason to act, to be, to live.
Now we live in a world where it is virtually impossible to miss even a single meal, and so our focus is on 'higher pursuits,' but it turns out that is mostly just other people trying to sell us things which will fulfill us, trying to convince you that it's a higher pursuit when really it is just a way to spend our material abundance on distractions while waiting on... what? What are we here for anymore?
Self-fulfillment seems just as distant as ever, and nobody seems interested in helping you actually achieve it, but by golly they'll try to convince you that they can if you just turn over your money!
It would be fine if there were people trying to sell us actual purpose like religions etc, which do still exist but are getting outcompeted in a capitalist world. Sadly in a free market for 'purposeful and meaningful activities' people are much more likely to pursue the easy path that is sold well than the hard path that actually provides what they want.
Right, I phrase is as us having removed virtually all of the actual 'struggles' that one used to undergo to become a fully actualized human, and 'replaced' them with artificial struggles of various sorts which have no real consequences for failure.
For many people, life in the western world is an amusement park ride, and not even the Action Park kind of ride where you actually risk serious injury. The Disney kind that is simultaneously engineered to make you feel strong emotions, maybe even fear, and yet keep any risk of liability to an absolutely minimum.
Which is fine, for children, but as an adult you are just too aware of that fact that the cart is on a steel track determining where you go and the monsters are animatronic puppets, you can't actually feel the same rush of joy from it anymore.
What also somewhat surprises me is that with the decline in religious fervor, we haven't managed to swap in an actual aspirational endeavor which can serve a similar function. We can look and see an endless frontier in outer space, we have the basic tech to push out into that great beyond, why do people instead seem to latch onto self-defeating degrowth ideologies?
Other than the fact that it benefits some subset of the population to spread such ideologies.
For some reason this comment reminds me very much of Jaron Lanier’s contrast between God and humans.
What you describe was also a major theme of the later Dune books. Namely that conflict and struggle was an inherent part of not just what humans are, but what animates our lives and gives us meaning and fulfillment. The lack of that was what led ultimately into the ensuing dark ages where space travel no longer happened.
I used to have this uneasy feeling I could never shake as a kid, about nomadic societies. How they were always moving from once place to another to satisfy their needs. But it wasn’t simply to change with the seasons so you could grow your crops and maintain the tribe. They were moving from place to place seeking meaning and a way to scratch that cognitive itch; in the same way people today can get up and move at a moment’s notice as if they’re running away from their problems, but never being able to escape them completely. I think America is a very unsettled society. And the more obstacles we remove and problems we solve, doesn’t just remove the obstacles we have with nature and the problems we have in society. It removes those obstacles that are necessary to keep that existential void at bay, in humanity.
“War is a force that gives us meaning”
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