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I was having a discussion about wokeness/culture war stuff the other day and was accused (probably justifiably) of rambling. This got me thinking about how I’d sum up my views on the matter as succinctly as possible, while still painting a clear picture. I figured doing so here would also provide a good opportunity to see just how similar and/or different it is from the high level world views of others. So here it goes.
The first pillar of my cultural worldview is that a lot of the movements that have now converged to form wokeness were justified in their original incarnations. Your average idealist in the 50s/60s was probably easily drawn into these movements, and for good reason; the types of racism, sexism, etc that existed in the early 20th century were truly institutionalized, and truly damaging to society.
At some point in the last 40 years, however, most of these problems were solved. Not in the sense that tribalism was eradicated, but in the sense that it was no longer institutional. It was reduced to the most benign form that you can really hope for in a multi-ethnic empire.
The problem was that the institutions that had been created to fix these problems were still there. They had developed large funding networks, large amounts of political clout, and most importantly, highly effective mythologies and channels for recruitment. The people heading these institutions weren’t just going to give all of that up. They had to invent new dragons to slay. Which leads us to where we are today. The once useful institutions have turned feral. While still doing what they were intended to do, they have begun doing it in a way that most objective observers would immediately recognize as contrary to the original goals. In short, these institutions are unaligned. They’re slow versions of the paperclip optimizer.
The second pillar is that the vast majority of the harm currently visited on people by society in western countries is due to cycles of poverty. That, however, is just a euphemism for a poor outcome from a very basic mammalian trait, the teaching of survival skills to one’s young. In a Darwinian environment, you maximize the chances of propagating your genes by teaching successful patterns of behavior to the next generation. As such, this drive to mold your children in your image, as well as the drive on the child’s part to emulate the parent in some very fundamental ways, are baked into our genes. But absent any sort of Darwinian pressure, those skills might not be optimized for your environment. In fact they may be highly non-optimal.
This problem is compounded by the fact that the goal of “survival skills” in the modern society is to maximize comfort, not quantity of surviving offspring. But a relationship still remains between the utility of the survival skills and the genes of the organism employing the strategy. As such, you can’t just come up with a set of strategies and teach them to everyone in society. It’s much more beneficial to have parents that have worked out good strategies for their set of genes, and then to pass those strategies on to the recipients of those genes. This makes it much more difficult for people stuck with bad skills to help their children break free.
I think those two pillars, taken together, allow for a pretty good overarching view of what is going on in western society. We have large swaths of the population suffering from poor choices generation after generation. And we have institutions that are highly incentivized to blame these problems on something else. Since we never actually look at the real causes of the problems, we will never solve them. And until something changes, that is the equilibrium state. Thoughts?
Your first pillar is true enough, but your second is somewhat confused. To be blunt, the fact that income and fertility are anticorrelated means that "cycles of poverty" are not actually failures from evolution's point of view - teaching your kids to be poor causes you to have more grandkids.
I'm not talking about success or failure from an evolutionary point of view, but from a societal point of view. From that vantage point, success is somewhat equated with levels of material comfort or success. But the evolutionary forces that promote the transmission of behavior to offspring make it very difficult to alter these outcomes for people whose parents "failed" from a societal point of view.
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