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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25504 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,

the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island

My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.

If so, what's going on here?

I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.

And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.

Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.

Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...

But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.

I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.

I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.

Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.

I think we’ve lost the ability to self organize to a large degree. There’s a sort of (https://www.adbusters.org/articles-coded/what-is-hypernormalization) hyper normalization that I’m observing in almost every aspect of modern life. It’s like everyone knows that the system doesn’t work anymore that our leaders don’t have any desire to fix things, most of the pre-centralized system institutions are largely withered away, and no one has any inkling of a way to get back to functioning society. We know, they know, they know we know, and none of it gets better because nobody has a vision of the future that doesn’t seem hopelessly naive.

I watch old shows from the past and what strikes me most is the lack of modern nihilism. People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending. Jedi were not opportunistic nihilists in it for themselves. The rebellion wanted a democracy for everyone. There was the sense that people in charge of things were altruistic and not self serving and that problems were fixable. It’s mostly gone. People just sort of default to a grim dark idea of the world in which nothing works, nothing gets fixed, and everyone has an angle.

And I think the nihilist mindset is part of why we no longer make those communities. If everything is unfixable and everyone is on the take, there’s no point in trying. Just get yous,protect yourself and your family, and try to not rely on other people and systems any more than you actually need to.

People seemed to put up leaders who legitimately wanted to solve whatever the problem was, and the writers tended to play that straight up. The person not only wanted to do good, but he was allowed to defeat evil and fix the problems and we actually had a happy ending.

I'm reminded here of a Tanner Greer piece at City Journal I read recently, on the popularity of dystopian YA novels (one of the many pieces drawn upon in an effortpost I'm currently mentally composing, involving Weberian rationalization, software “eating the world,” “computer says ‘no’,” Jonathan Nolan TV series, “Karens” wanting to talk to a manager, the TSA, Benjamin Boyce interviewing Aydin Paladin, and the Butlerian Jihad):

This is the defining feature of the YA fictional society: powerful, inscrutable authorities with a mysterious and obsessive interest in the protagonist. Sometimes the hidden hands of this hidden world are benign. More often, they do evil. But the intentions behind these spying eyes do not much matter. Be they vile or kind, they inevitably create the kind of protagonist about whom twenty-first century America loves to read: a young hero defined by her frustration with, or outright hostility toward, every system of authority that she encounters.

The resonance these stories have with the life of the twenty-first-century American teenager is obvious. The stories are, as perceptive film critic Jonathan McAlmont observes, “very much about living in a world where parents discuss things out of earshot.” The protagonists all struggle “to perform the role that grownups have assigned [them], despite the fact that [they] are still coming to terms” with their own identity and purpose. Teenage frustration with a lack of agency is the fuel that propels Anglophone pop culture. The prewar imagescape of these novels supplies extra emotional resonance, styling the problem of out-of-date authority as a holdover from a stuffier, more restrictive past. For the hero of a YA tale, this general problem would be resolved in the final, climactic battle with the powers that be. In his or her quest for victory, the protagonist would journey from pawn to player. There are few transformations for which the modern teenager yearns more.

And yet, these stories also increasingly resonate with modern adults as well:

This obsession is grounded in experience. It is not just twenty-first-century teenagers who feel buffeted by forces beyond their control. Bearing the brunt of a recession we did not cause, facing disastrous wars the stakes of which were unclear at best, the citizens of the liberal West spent the last two decades nursing the wounds of lost agency. This loss extends past grand politics. A series of studies have traced this process in the United States. Increasingly, Americans “bowl alone”: the social clubs, civic societies, and congregations that once gave normal people meaningful social responsibilities have declined significantly. Most issue-oriented action groups that remain are staffed by professionals who seek only money from their members. As a growing number of Americans live in crowded cities, government becomes more remote and less responsive to any individual’s control—a problem exacerbated by the increasingly national cast of American politics. More important still, one-third of Americans now find themselves employed by corporations made impersonal by their scale. The decisions that determine the daily rounds of the office drone are made in faraway boardrooms—rooms, one might say, “where adults discuss things out of earshot.” What decides the destiny of Western man? Credit scores he has only intermittent access to. Regulations he has not read. HR codes he had no part in writing.

For the most part, the citizens of the West have accepted this. They have learned to comply with expert directives. They have learned to endure by filing complaints. They have learned to ask first when faced with any problem: “Can I speak to the manager?” They have accustomed themselves to life as a data point.

…

Yet if these novels speak to the sum of our anxieties, they are a poor guide to escaping them. In the world of YA speculative fiction, those who possess such power cannot be trusted. Even worse than possessing power is to seek it: our fables teach that to desire responsibility is to be corrupted by it. They depict greatness as a thing to be selected, not striven, for. This fantasy is well fit for an elite class whose standing is decided by admissions boards, but a poor guide for an elite class tasked with actually leading our communities.

The key part that stood out to me was the final two paragraphs:

Yet outside of the modern fairy realm, power is not given, but created. The morality of the twenty-first-century fairy tale is in fact a road map to paralysis. Its heroes begin as the playthings of manipulative and illegitimate authorities, their goodness made clear by their victimhood. But faced with this illicit order, nothing can be done: even rebellion can be trusted only to unwilling rebels. Our fairy tales imagine a world where only those who do not want power are deemed fit to use it. Translate that back to reality, and we are left with a world where all power is, and will always be, deemed illegitimate. No magic curses justify the power of our managerial class; ultimately, their legitimacy rests on how well they wield it.

In the stories of the modern fairy realm we see the seeds of stagnation. Protesters who occupy Zuccotti Park without the faintest notion of what their occupation should accomplish, political parties that seize all branches of the government without a plan for governing, Ivy League students pretending that they are not, in fact, elite—all of this flows from a culture that can articulate the anxieties of the overmanaged but cannot conceive of a healthy model of management. We cannot suffer ourselves to imagine righteous ambition even in our fantasies. Responsible leadership is not possible even in our fairy world. Little wonder so few strive to realize it in the real one.

We seem to have become allergic to the idea of human leadership, of having a person — and not a faceless bureaucracy — actually make decisions, use common sense, exercise personal agency, with "the buck stops here" responsibility for them. And it's the latter that really stands out. It's not just that we seem to fear the idea of having someone else in charge of us — though we submit readily to Hannah Arendt's rule of Nobody, "a tyranny without a tyrant" — but that we're perhaps even more afraid of stepping up and taking charge ourselves, of bearing responsibility for that power and its consequences. We find it better to be a human cog in the machine, able to say "I don't make the rules, I just follow them," than to take ownership of the exercise of power.

(Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?)

Can you imagine someone in the West writing a story of an orphaned child soldier achieving his lifelong ambition of becoming military dictator, and not having it be played as a tragedy?

1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever. 2), no, although there was a tv series loosely based on a fictionalized account of the life of Bashar Al-Assad which played him sympathetically(this was before the war), although I can’t remember the name of it.

But more to the point, modern literature is allergic to leadership and agency because the protagonists are figures to which things happen, and not figures who make things happen- you said as much- but it’s worth emphasizing that this is a relatively recent change. The Lord of the Rings has its fair share of protagonists going out and shaping the world in which they live. So does other older fantasy like the Belgariad. Compare to Harry Potter and Twilight, where protagonists don’t necessarily do nothing, but neither do they take a particularly active role in shaping the narrative. Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen are content to be manipulated by more powerful figures in a way that Roald Dahl protagonists and the kids of Chronicles of Narnia aren’t.

And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.

1), I’d read the shit out of that book, or watch the movie, whatever.

I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.

And this is in part because our society is allergic to leadership. Modern American society- or at least the literati class- don’t want people to stand up, take charge when something needs taking charge, and get stuff done. And that applies to themselves as much as everyone else; the cultural production class is utterly terrified of being in charge.

This is exactly my point. And I'd agree that while it's only recently that it's become so widespread, I think there's a case that, per Max Weber, the roots go back over a century, possibly to the "Enlightenment" itself.

I was, in fact, referring to a best-selling manga series with this description.

Naruto is an extremely noncentral example of a child soldier.

Yeah, reading that, my mind went to the Gundam franchise, but I don't think any series from that IP comes close to that description.

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