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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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What does the light at the end of the tunnel look like?

Look, every now and then I stop watching my footfalls and get pensive. And one of the things I've gotten pensive about the past few days is this: the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?

Two of the answers are obvious:

  1. If the culture war ends in X-catastrophe, then we won't look back on it at all, because there will be no more historians.
  2. If SJ wins, it'll look back on now much the same way it looks back on the '50s right now, with maybe a few mentions of Nazis added.

But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable. Frankly, the Blue Tribe's been writing all the history books since before I was born, so it's hard for me to even picture it. And that troubles me; it's the scenario I think is most likely, and the one I'm to at least some extent trying to bring about, so if I don't have a good idea of what it even looks like that's kind of an HCF. "It is not enough to say that you do not like the way things are. You must say how you will change them, and to what."

So, how will the people in that scenario think of this time? What story will they tell?

(To the SJers here: feel free to answer, if you think you understand your opposition, or feel free to correct me if you think my #2 is uncharitable.)

I find it easy to imagine the current culture war ending with the defeat of the social justice worldview. What that would look like is somewhat like jihadism looks like today - it is an ideology with a small number of adherents, but mainstream culture and political establishments on both sides reject it unequivocally (while one side does so slightly less vocally and a few fringe figures flirt with them enough to keep them on side).

For this to happen, the social justice worldview needs to lose popularity obviously, it is currently too big to be marginalised. But that can easily happen. Ideologies are often abandoned when they cease to be useful - hardly anyone believes in "manifest destiny" today. SJ is currently useful to the left because they have managed to form a coalition of minorities, so promoting minorities means promoting leftists. This falls apart if people start sorting along different lines. E.g. if current trends continue towards education becoming the key political divider, you could easily end up with a working class ideology (we the people!) versus an elitist ideology (the people are retarded).

If that were to happen it doesn't matter whether the elites or the rabble win - neither will have an interest in promoting identity grievance. The new culture war will have its own problems of course - the elites may be dismissive or ignorant of the material concerns of ordinary people and the rabble may actively damage their own society to tear down those they resent - but they will be different problems.

And then two hundred years hence some people will look back and say "How fascinating! The 21st century west thought that maleness was simply a state of mind unconnected to biology! Imagine living in such a time!"