This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The upthread discussion about male role models reminded me of a web essay that I can no longer find (damn it). The author was a male English professor for undergrads. His course satisfied a general requirement, so his male student population broadly represented the student body. In the essay, the author observed that when his male students were given an opportunity to select a text or topic to study, the most popular subject was always power.
I don’t recall the author proposing any reason for that preference. We can come up with a couple.
Broke: They know that power is the ultimate aphrodesiac.
Woke: They are already toxically masculine. The professor should focus exclusively on books by queer women of color, who hate power.
Bespoke: They are thinking about the Roman Empire.
I’ll have to expand on that last one.
Ages ago, I came across someone asking why 19th Century Britain seemed to be so obsessed with Rome. One responder said “Britain found itself with an empire unexpectedly. The 19th Century British culture was looking to ancient Rome to give it context. How should they act? What is it like to have an empire? What can they learn?”
That sprang to mind as I was reading the essay. Those teenage boys knew that they were on the cusp of having power, over themselves at least. They should, at least. What does that mean? How should they behave?
My question, then, is: What would you recommend for those boys, to help them understand the power that they will eventually wield?
A random selection of old moralizing history books with salient and exaggerated examples of the consequences of leadership. Start with Roman histories and go through medieval histories, only using the best anecdotes selected with wisdom. Like passages from an old book on Napoleon that specifically relates his personality deficits and biases to his campaign failures, with none of the irrelevant factoids that modern historians wrongly believe should be in history books. They must internalize the Great Man theory of history writ as large as possible. They should have an idea of which Byzantine emperors resulted in their people being overrun by Ottomans, and also which Muslims were able to conquer so much territory and with what means, etc etc.
Large-scale history is important because an ambitious man should see that wasting his talent selling overpriced shitty sneakers will eventually — over many iteration of souls — result in the complete destruction of his nation, and means that all of the efforts of his people were for nothing, which history proves time and time again. If the people/nation do not have the right hierarchy and orientation, that’s problem #1 to solve. History teaches that well. The riches of Baghdad meant nothing when one of their leaders decided to insult the Mongols. Who remembers the wealthiest Iroquois? Where are the riches of Mansa Musa?
Great Man theory is essential because it’s the most effective method for information internalization. Man is a social creature who naturally comes equipped with disk space that is only allotted for social information. Our memory for other people is naturally superior than other memory for statistics and rules. And so what you do is you represent human nature as people, dramatized, so that a reader can store as much information as efficiently as possible, imitating and revering some examples, afraid of other examples, and so on. Great Man Theory is the only cognitively correct way to study history for a leader. Academics are too dumb to realize that. It’s something like 1000x more useful to know the narrative of Napoleon in relation to his personality and those of his advisers and foes than to know any date, or any location, or even how to spell his name. At the end of the day what we aim to take away is something that can be applied in our own lives.
So after the highest hierarchy of history, you can move down to lessons about companies and how companies thrive and fail. Because this is probably where an ambitious young man will end up, anyway. So like, essays or passages from essays on IBM, Yahoo, Google, etc. Then I’d suggest an “inoculation against liars”, so some readings about how mainstream news lies about stuff, how to glean truthful information.
Lastly, readings from the Bible and readings from psychology
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link