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I don't think religious belief necessarily implies feudalism, or that lack of religious belief implies non-feudalism. I also thought you meant having to socially conform to your local community, not literal serfdom.
To be fair, I'm kind of an extreme case in how much I hate having to conform to any community.
But yes, of course just having to socially conform to a community is much less bad than literal serfdom. But by the same token, isn't you saying "being dominated by people who know nothing about me, and have values completely alien to mine" also a pretty strong exaggeration of what modernity is actually like? The reality, it seems to me, is that the average social conservative of today probably shares like 80% of values in common with the average elite of today. It's just that we focus on the differences.
Honestly it seems like an understatement. Rather it's being dominated by people who actively hate one's culture and openly boast about being the best at exterminating it.
I'm no Religious man, but I certainly feel more free to live a normal human life in an Islamic theocracy than in the modern managerial state. And I say this having experienced the downsides of both. At least with the theocrats the rules are not constantly changing and there is a defined limiting principle you can invoke to keep the peace.
I’d be interested in reading about your Islamic experience, if you’ve written it up anywhere.
Last year, I had a fascinating conversation with a woman who spent the early 80s in Riyadh. It really made me think.
I usually avoid talking about my private life in too much detail on the internet, but one of these days I should do an effort post on the ambivalent relationship with monarchy and Islam I inherited from my father. There is definitely something there.
As for that story it is really funny in that it's so typically American. You guys have this exuberant confidence that is so outrageous it somehow wraps around from obnoxious to endearing.
It's not always a good, I've seen American cultural insensitivity blow up many things, but at heart I can't help but admire this unabashed patriotism and enthusiasm about one's way of life.
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I'm not much of social conformist either, in fact my distaste for modernity stems directly from that. The issue is that it seems the only choice is who to conform to, and in hindsight conforming to your family and community seems strictly superior.
Not really. My point was that it's comparable in it's intensity to the pressure your local community would put on you. I don't think that's an exaggeration.
Now this is where I hold some extreme views.
Could you elaborate?
What I meant by the 80% is that most Westerners, elite or not, socially conservative or not, largely agree about things like:
"murdering is bad" (unless war, self-defense, justified revolution, etc, etc, or whatever other supposedly justified reasons are given, but at least most people do agree that walking up and killing someone for no reason is bad)
"books should not be literally banned by law" (there are censorious progressives and various hate speech laws here and there, but almost no-one calls for widespread banning of texts, and even the ones who do feel that it needs to be justified by appeals to security, which means that they still hold free speech on some level as a value)
"women should be able to vote just like men can" (the number of people who disagree with this is very small)
Etc.
I guess maybe you personally disagree with the elites on values more than the average social conservative does, but I might be misunderstanding.
I hold some capital D deranged views on the nature of our elites. I'm pretty sure mass scale depopulation is one of their goals, and another is setting up a global digital panopticon where they will have total control over what we say, do, or even think.
You might be right on basic stuff like "murder bad", but I wouldn't say that constitutes 80% agreement.
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