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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   25948 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I think a big issue with modern culture is the loss of the idea that people can actually make a positive difference or that progress is possible and desirable. If you read (or watch) science fiction up through modernism, you’ll find descriptions of humans having overcome their problems, building successful colonies in space, dealing with poverty or disease or pollution or whatever other problems that they faced. They described futures that people would want to live in. And I think this kind of bleeds into the issue of whether we can solve our problems. We’ve sort of lost that imaginative muscle to various forms of cynicism and defeatism in all of our systems. Nobody seriously thinks that politics can offer real solutions to social problems. We don’t really think that we can build cities people want to live in. We don’t really think we can solve crime problems. We don’t think we can fix education or transportation or infrastructure or housing. It’s weird that nobody thinks anything about our society will be better in a generation or two.

I think a big issue with modern culture is the loss of the idea that people can actually make a positive difference or that progress is possible and desirable.

Yes, why would modern culture do duch a thing? It's almost like someone made a bunch of promises they couldn't keep, and went on to punish anyone trying a different approach.

Why do people refuse to believe you van fix crime when we have Salvador out there as example?

Or, just New York. They had crime, they largely fixed it, then abandoned the fixes..

There's a very good Tanner Greer post about this. Wang Huning identified the defining feature of the US in the 80s as techno-optimism, not liberty or democracy. But that's a quality that has been lost and inherited by the Chinese. If someone proposed building a bridge over the Pacific today, it would be China, not America.

I agree overall, although I'd argue that the progress enjoyed by the current generation of Chinese adults is highly unlikely to be replicated by their children. I expect they'll go down the same path we did unless 'Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics' and endless readings of 'Xi Jinping Thought' can save them.

My money is on pessimism setting in 20-30 years from now, and foreign capital moves to Vietnam or Africa or whatever the next manufacturing base will be.

I agree that it remains to be seen whether this can be sustained. And the US also still has a lot of visionaries like Elon Musk. But it seems like the tide is going out for them.

The "lying flat" movement in China would seem to buttress what you're saying.

Everyone making a positive difference is like saying "everyone can grow up to be president". There are only a few slots for presidents and there aren't enough for everyone, so some people will inevitably fail at becoming president by no fault of their own.

I don’t mean that the culture believes that literally anyone can make a positive difference, but that a positive difference can be made, that the future could be better, that problems could be solved. It was the last gasp of genuine future optimism where people expected that things would be better. Now, most people are cynical and expect that everything will be worse, that they’ll live poorer lives, and that their kids will not have what they grew up with.

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