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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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I’m not trying to be facetious.

My point is that the difference between then and now is mainly a product of huge increases in total societal prosperity. 2/3 of your examples (working on a cattle ranch and running a store) are totally possible today, it’s just most people don’t want to do them because they’re hard work and poorly paid compared to a lot of other stuff you could do.

Most men didn’t seek their fortune in the West as some kind of grand adventure, they did it because they were desperate and poor, because life in the urban tenements of the East Coast was intolerable, because they held out hope for a small fraction of the quality of life that the average American has today.

You’re romanticizing what in many ways was the historical equivalent of Nigerien migrants crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy dinghies in the hope that they become soccer champions. A sad phenomenon that modern young Western men need not take part in because they have already won the birth lottery.

Not American but I think missing element is colonisation. Going, taking ‘virgin’ territory and making it yours, founding a society congenial to you on top of it.

Winning the lottery doesn’t get you enough money to buy a significant amount of land AFAIK and has much worse odds than even prospecting. Going off a building a log cabin requires significant starting capital and won’t get you out from the now-well-developed legal system. If you want to escape modern society the only places you can try it now are MUCH more inclement than the old west and/or ruled by warlords.

(There is also romanticism, but I do think the frontier made a valuable pressure valve for the reasons stated. )

You can work on a cattle ranch today, but it's just being a corporate drone with horses. If you run a store (aside from some specialties), you're either going to be a corporate drone, or you'll be going out of business for lack of customers, or you'll go out of business because the corporations can do it cheaper and better.