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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30131 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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This excellent piece on age segregation has got me thinking about how serious and pervasive this problem is. As the author states:

Young adults are afraid to have children, because they can’t possibly imagine adding some to the life they currently have. New parents are isolated from most of their previous friends, as their paths suddenly never cross again unless they too have kids of their own. Children compete within their age group at schools, never having a chance to either mentor someone or have an older mentor themselves. Teenagers have no idea what to do with their lives, because they don’t know anyone who isn’t a teacher or their parent. And everyone is afraid of growing old because they think that the moment they stop going to the office they’ll simply disappear.

As discussed in @2rafa's post downthread, a major issue of the fertility crisis is a lack of time. Another issue it seems is a lack of even interacting with children unless you have some yourself, or have some in your family. I wonder if the lack of time among young adults in the West is causative of this age segregation?

Regardless, it likely has its roots in the K-12 education system. It's profoundly unnatural from a cultural standpoint to only be in the same peer group as people right around your age. I'm convinced it's unhealthy, and it predisposes us in a massive way to only socialize with people close to our age.

Do you think age segregation is an issue as well? If not, why not?

I think age segregation is a problem, but I’m not sure there’s a good solution to it, either. Ideally robust extended families would function to break it, but we don’t have those and we’re not going to.

There's a solution, but you wouldn't like it.

Create a movement that wishes to see the world dangerous again.

Create a doctrine that attracts people and abhors the managerial regime. Patiently disrupt services through least legally risky forms of sabotage.

Once things come tumbling down, actual serious hardship is real, there's anarchy, people will form communities. Or die, bit the survival drive of most people is strong.

There's no reason for community if what the omnipresent state can't give you isn't something the market can either sell you directly or provide you with an inferior substitute of.

Seems space exploration and colonization could be a good outlet for the dangerous world desires.

I agree. I think without a frontier to explore, people tend to get neurotic and society mutates in ways that aren’t ultimately healthy. Plus, we don’t have to destroy things or depopulate earth. Just send them to mars.

For there to be exploration you need something interesting to find, otherwise why send people to Mars? For them to fuck around and waste expensive to ship supplies?

The purpose of a frontier is settlement. The goal would be to create "self-sustaining" settlements on the Moon or Mars. ("Self-sustaining" here meaning economically, primarily, not literally able to exist forever with zero imports)

The incentive mechanism is straightforward: so long as settlers require economic subsidy, they are citizens of the colonizing nation, like regular astronauts, bound by its laws and duties. Once they are economically self-sufficient and can pay for their inputs on the open market, they gain political independence, ownership of the settlement passes to the settlement collectively, and they may choose to establish whatever form of government seems best to them.

Why would any government subsidize the creation of a colony with no expectation of ultimately realising the profits?

Well, there are minerals in space. More land and this more space for people. We sent people to the New World on leaky boats on the promise of land for the taking and possibly minerals.

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