This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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):
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:
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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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
SovietFeminist 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.
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".
"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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Samuel Johnson provides a pithy (as you’d expect from him) expression of this, even in a time far more patriarchical than our own:
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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:
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
As a strategy, tribalism dominates non-tribalism. If there's a "team women" but no "team men", then men are going to be steamrollered.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Is he even having a wife?
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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!
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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,
—
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.
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 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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with the vast majority of this, with the caveat that I don't think it's good to flat-out asserting
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.
Why? Young men with no prospects imitating criminals (and eventually joining them) has been a thing for... like ever.
More options
Context Copy link
Hah! You're not wrong :)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
Then we get some banal, inoffensive, ineffective ideas of what masculinity should be:
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.
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.
Still can't. Humans can only build machines that fly.
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.
This claim is vacuous, though.
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.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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:
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Damn son. That's the blackpill right there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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.
What? This is just circular reasoning.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this a joke?
More effort than this, please.
More options
Context Copy link
Not in the slightest.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
There is meaning all around though. This sounds a lot like projection to me.
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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?
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...
Bluntly, what makes you think that the people who develop and own these technologies will want to spend eternity with you?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
Look at what happened to horses the moment they stopped being necessary.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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?
But a luxury good for whom? You? Or whoever happens to feel like keeping you around?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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:
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.
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 (
alsomainly 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 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.
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 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
"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.
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.
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?
I read her book, and I more or less agree tbh
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.
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.
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
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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 moistnessearning 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.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.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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 daycare 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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
And people argue in favor of them receiving more
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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?
Which historical investigations can we read on this? Which medieval societies and their laymen, which polygamist societies?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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:
Religion is often also the centerpiece of rebellions:
For an idea of what people thought about religion and superstition day to day:
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:
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.
Definitely, but I think in a mostly non-transcendental way.
Religion was and is for most people, a very functional and indeed, material thing.
As for theology, canon law, universities—very much minority affairs.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
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?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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:
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.
:(
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
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.
You're on solid ground here because he actually explicitly says as much multiple times and in multiple places.
More options
Context Copy link
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".
"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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.'
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.
It has happened many, many times, not just twice- the dividing lines between Ideology and Religion are more of an illusion than a reality.
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.
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.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link