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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I often think of liberalism as a bell jar: since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there is essentially no competing world view that people in the west are exposed to. Everyone they meet are some kind of liberal. Liberals call each other "liberals" as an insult. The "communists" are really liberals, the "alt-right" are really liberals, when you scratch beneath whatever surface label they've applied to themselves all you find is a liberal. On the one hand this is a reflection of the blinding success of liberalism but also has resulted in a significant weakening of liberalism as an effective mode of governance.

To treat liberalism as an inevitable endpoint, or a universal truth, or some manifestation of the underlying laws of the universe; it undermines what made liberalism triumphant and successful.

Edit: Meant this as a direct reply to @HlynkaCG.

I think the bit you are missing is that the liberal western order is itself a solution to the Hobbes position. Rather than an authoritarian regime, it turns out, if you convince everyone that everyone else is actually a good person, and create a whole strata of social pressures and reinforcements, if you create that illusion so convincing so that you treat people that way...then you can have a bunch of red in tooth and claw apes crammed into close proximity...and almost all of them end up not trying to murder each other.

Far from looking at the weakness of the liberal order, consider its triumph. There is a reason people want to move to the liberal world, because the illusion actually creates a better place.

If you think that Hobbes was right about fundamental human nature then the liberal world order is an astonishing accomplishment. It has successfully pushed the violent to the fringes. Millions upon millions of animals are packed like sardines into tiny metal boxes every day and DO NOT kill each other!

Now yes, it does then struggle to deal with those fringes, because the whole illusion hinges on people essentially believing everyone is decent. But that is a much smaller problem than much less successful places. I've been to Nairobi and Pakistan and China and the liberal order is significantly better.

You're focussing on the Leviathan shaped hole, without noticing how tiny it is compared to what Hobbes would predict. Significantly more freedom than the authoritarian feudal sovereigns he envisaged would be needed to control humanities base impulses.A place where most people act as if a sovereign has presence even when it doesn't. Where large numbers of them obey traffic lights even when no-one else is around! Human nature tamed by human socialization.

The Liberal civilizational illusion is a triumph of order over chaos. An order created primarily by social behaviors and a great lie. A lie that becomes truth when we believe it to be true. An emergent system that has outcompeted every rival. Communism? Wrecked. Feudalism? Imploded. Libertarianism? Can't even get a foothold.

And you are quibbling over how it has not been 100% successful in controlling human nature? Thats like complaining your football team won 42-7, because they let a single touchdown in. Sure its not perfect, but it is very close!

To restate in your example, the whole reason you can have hundreds of people in tight proximity in a tiny metal tube and that only a random schizophrenic causes trouble is because of how utterly brilliant the liberal order is. You don't notice all the things it prevents, because they didn't happen in the first place.