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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   26432 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Something I've been working on; presenting it here to solicit the feedback of the hive-mind.

The Life Cycle of Fashionable Causes

Inspired by some of this recent commentary on the latest trends in identity politics, I’ve been inspired to try and outline a possible model for how these things emerge, develop, and fade. Originally this was written with identity politics in mind, but you could probably apply the model to other things, such as the centuries-long transition of Christianity from being an outlaw religion to a state-sanctioned religious monopoly, or the rise of revolutionary Marxism. I draw heavily from the “Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths” model. Also, I more or less take it as a given that identity politics, in its most common form, is intellectually incoherent and most of its champions are largely driven by self-interest; I will not be discussing the merits of any particular form of it here.

Stage 1: Client identification

Elite-entrepreneurs identify some conceivably-marginalized group (racial or religious minorities, the handicapped, slaves) and position themselves as champions of said group. This is especially frequent in times of elite overproduction, for obvious reasons. Note that at this stage, these champions may well be selfish, but they aren’t necessarily insincere. On the contrary, they’re likely to be true believers. Remember, the cause isn’t fashionable yet. On the contrary, advocating for it too strongly will likely raise eyebrows in polite society. There was a time when Christians were still a despised and hated minority, and when anyone suggesting that slavery should be abolished would be met with astonishment. John Brown was a villain before he became a hero. Our elite-entrepreneurs are analogous to settlers or prospectors on the cultural frontier. They may hope to hit pay dirt but they haven’t yet.

Stage 2: Advocacy

This is the long march through the institutions. The champions create platforms for advocacy, or seek positions within existing platforms (academia, parliaments, the Senate). They form organizations, publish manifestos, recruit disciples. Very importantly, during this stage the cause starts to accrue social capital. Not a lot perhaps, but a little, concentrated in certain areas. It starts to be possible to accrue legitimacy and street cred in “the movement” even its only with other supporters and second-generation converts to the cause. You may still face penalty or sanction for association with the cause among the general public though.

Stage 3: Critical Mass

The cause is now practically mainstream. People put their preferred pronouns in their linked-in bios; they say “He is Risen” as a greeting. It’s likely that in the process of expanding, the movement has softened some of its hard edges and dispensed with some of its more controversial positions. This is the gold-rush stage. The cost of joining the movement is now relatively low, and an increasingly large portion of converts are simple band-wagon jumpers.

Stage 4: Fragmentation

As the movement expands, the social capital it began accruing in stage 2 starts to dissipate. Its no longer hip or cutting edge to be associated with it. The late-comers to the movement are frustrated because they can no longer accrue status by participation. The old guard (the Old Bolsheviks) are frustrated because the movement has lost its purity and its revolutionary fervor. At this point, you start to see infighting. There are lots of attempts to establish internal discipline, to decide who is and is not truly part of the movement, which particular courses of action best serve the cause. Much of this comes down to fighting over scraps of power and prestige; the gold rush days are over.

Stage 5: Dissolution

At this point, the movement is largely spent. Some of its precepts have probably been normalized in the culture at large (not even the race-realists nowadays advocate for a return to slavery). Precisely because the cause was largely triumphant, you no longer draw any attention to yourself by advocating for it. In the case of sufficiently far-reaching transformations – such as the mass adoption of Christianity – the movement has probably become such a big tent that you can find people advocating for totally-opposed courses of action, each claiming to represent the true spirit of the movement. In the Catholic-Protestant wars which racked Europe for centuries, both sides claimed to fight in the name of Christ. Other such totalizing philosophies, like Marxism-Leninism, have had their own internal schisms. Its important to note that simply because a belief system has become such a big tent that it can seemingly accommodate or justify almost anything, that doesn’t mean the movement which spawned it had no impact. The fall of paganism, the rise of Protestantism, and eventual rise of Marxism-Leninism all left the world a very different place than it was before.

A few other notes here: Obviously this is presented as a linear model, and assumes that the movement in question is ultimately more or less successful. There’s no reason that need be the case. I’m sure further investigation would identify a number of movements which never progressed through all these stages. For that matter, I see no reason in principle a movement couldn’t move back and forth through these stages, or even be in different stages among different sectors of the population.

With regards to identity politics, I think that in certain sectors, (academia, most establishment media organizations), its probably in stage-4. Affirmative-action hiring policies are increasingly ubiquitous, but at the same time, there is massive labor surplus for a relatively small number of jobs. In the case of media, the financial opportunities are rapidly declining, as Freddie DeBoer has documented extensively; while academia hasn’t yet collapsed I strongly suspect the current model is not sustainable, and there may be an implosion at some point in the future. People are hopping on board the identity politics bandwagon in an attempt to carve out a secure niche, but enough people have hopped on this bandwagon that now they’ve hit diminishing returns, and will now have to start adjudicating who is and is not a member of minority group X

Seems well-written to me.

I can’t say I agree with the stages, necessarily? Especially 1 and 2. “Client ID” describes a phase in some movements, where adoption doesn’t pick up until elites grab the idea. But it doesn’t fit others. Look at Christianity, which didn’t gain elite support until it was firmly established among the periphery. It skips stage 2 entirely, too, since most of its institutions don’t develop until after regional hegemony. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it started from stage 2.

Have you considered a comparison with Scott’s barber pole of fashion?

  • Class A adopts signals from a (much) lower Class C
  • Class B could imitate those signals, but they’d risk looking like Class C
  • Class C sticks to imitating Class B since they have no chance of passing as Class A
  • Class K is suitable for use on grease fires

Pretty similar to the g/m/s model, except all the levels have a similar level of awareness. There’s no clueless class existing only to get played by the next step up; instead, each group acts according to its own intuition. But you still get segmented behavior if there’s enough space to distinguish A from C.

So, does this apply to political causes?

I’m going to argue “yes.” Maybe that’s because I’m an inveterate mistake theorist and I don’t like the idea that individuals are driven by class interest. Personal incentives, though? Fair game. I think you can explain a lot of political phenomena as (counter) signaling without giving too much credit to the sociopaths.

I don't actually know enough about the early history of Christianity to make a claim one way or another, to be honest. I'd be interested if you have an alternative set of stages. Or even if you just think there's a better word than "stages" which does sort of imply a linear progression in what is not necessarily a linear process.

Regarding your latter point, I think for me, "class interest" is basically just an emergent phenomena of people following their own personal incentives. For example, if I'm lawyer or doctor, anything lowering the barrier to entry in these fields is against my personal economic interest. Meanwhile, people with aspirations of upward mobility from non-PMC backgrounds, who can't afford or qualify for however many thousands of dollars of student debt that career path entails, would prefer that these barriers to entry be lowered."Class" is such a slippery phenomena; any given individual might be in different classes over the course of their lives, and if we use the word in the broadest sense (to include, say, religious or ethnic groups as well as socioeconomic strata), several different classes at the same time.

I’d say the five categories (ID-advocacy-critical-fragmentation-dissolution) are describing a real phenomenon. The problem is that it’s not the only life cycle. Sometimes an idea just really is appealing!

This is my understanding of, say, early Christianity, which saw strong growth in the fringes despite active persecution by the elite. No Client ID, since the entrepreneurs of Christianity largely were their underserved population. Advocacy based on building power structures which happened to conflict with elite ones like tax collection. More importantly, the Critical Mass for Christianity either lasted up til the modern era, or passed into Fragmentation immediately! It was actively gaining social capital even through its early schisms and heresies.

When growth is powered by geeks instead of sociopaths, the framework doesn’t make sense. There’s a rival life cycle that describes sincere movements. Call it “technology adoption,” where the underlying idea is strong enough to spread in the absence of status games.

Once you have a rival model, though, you have to ask which one fits each fashion. How do you decide?

Apologies for the lateness of this reply; I go through long stretches of inactivity here. Maybe both geeks and sociopaths can be driving growth concurrently? At any given time, in any given movement, you can have participants along the whole spectrum of motives. Its probably also true that some movements have "better tech" than others; they're more likely to take root and have lasting impacts. The various Abrahamic monotheisms come to mind as movements with really strong tech. If anything, its probably that the better the underlying idea, the more status to be gained by getting in on the ground floor.

I think there’s also an aspect of “fashion barber poles”. I think my clearest political example would be something like color-blind politics where the race of the person wasn’t supposed to matter at all. This was the goal in the 1970s and 1980s. A not-racist believed that race didn’t matter. The problem was that “normies” started to buy in to that. Essentially they won. Everyone from Reagan to Bernie Sanders believed in that at the time. So it loses a bit of cred not because of internal problems with the movement, but because if you’re upper class, there’s a certain amount of pressure to not be mistaken for the unwashed masses. And much like fashion, food trends, and media trends, ideological trends follow in a predictable pattern of the aspirational trying to imitate the elite, the normie imitating them, and the elite wanting to separate themselves from the mainstream. Thus the movement changes to things that normies don’t do.

Interesting post! Are you familiar with the idea of the Rescue Game? I think you might find the following article an interesting resource, because it presents an alternative perspective on some of the phenomena you're identifying here. Here's an article on the topic that introduced me to the concept - https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-14/american-narratives-the-rescue-game/

First time I've seen the rescue game, though I am familiar with John Michael Greer's writing. Generally I've found him quite insightful, though I think I probably have a fundamental disagreement with (what I understand to be) his broadly anti-growth philosophy. I was most interested to learn about the parallels to race discourse in the post-reconstruction south. Everything old is new again!

Stage 1 and 2 seem to imply that all movements start with elites, who are not themselves a natural client. I'd prefer a more market-style reading, where the niche exists first, and may be filled with a variety of solutions. But as in a nature documentary, we choose to follow a particular entrepreneur who comes up with an idea that allow them to make money/gain power in the niche. They may not be the only one exploiting the niche, so there may be competition. And they may have found the niche by being part of it themselves, as in Paul Graham's advice to build something you want to use. And there were entrepreneurs before them, and there will be some after them too.

I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together. And as Lenin discovered, an ideological vanguard is a great way to do it. And if you want the movement to persist, the mass of people should never actually be satisfied, which was one of those criticisms of consumer capitalism that can easily be repurposed to describe the slippery slope of activism.

Stage 1 and 2 seem to imply that all movements start with elites, who are not themselves a natural client. I'd prefer a more market-style reading, where the niche exists first, and may be filled with a variety of solutions. But as in a nature documentary, we choose to follow a particular entrepreneur who comes up with an idea that allow them to make money/gain power in the niche.

And I'd prefer that the proponents of a market-style reading made their assumptions explicit, and backed their interpretation by argument and evidence, rather than relying on the truthiness of their story, hoping it will be enough for the picture of "organic" power that they paint to remain unquestioned.

For example, sure it can be seen as "market-style" and "nature documentary", provided you have sufficiently cynical view of the market/nature. But for people who grew up under 90's liberalism, that sounds like the choices to follow particular "entrepreneurs" are freely made, and if this is what you assert, I'm prepared to push back with examples from both the market, nature, politics, and social movements.

I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together.

That's no really new, it's a message that all democratic countries bombard their citizens with. What I think is far more useful for people to know is that this implies that if an "organic" movement is getting anywhere, rather than flailing around aimlessly, it means it's being led. If you're participating in one, and think it's "bottom-up" nature is evidence of it's good intentions and mundaneness, you better look twice, identify it's leaders, find out where they actually want to take, and make sure you are comfortable going there.

You seem to be reacting very strongly to something, and I'm not entirely sure what, but we might be closer than you think.

By "nature documentary", I mean that although we happen to be following one little fellow around with our camera, and building audience identification with him, the choice of subject is either largely arbitrary, or selected after-the-fact when we know who gets a result we're interested in. But there's many of these potential subjects operating at any given time, with various degrees of success. If we only follow the stories of young stags who win the mating contest, or successful leaders of movements, or successful startup founders, we don't get a complete picture of the lifecycle, and can fool ourselves into mis-attributing the amounts of ability, tenacity, opportunism, and luck that are required for success. And to the degree that the OP's goal is building a theory of what happens, I think it's important to look at all the angles.

But for people who grew up under 90's liberalism, that sounds like the choices to follow particular "entrepreneurs" are freely made, and if this is what you assert, I'm prepared to push back with examples from both the market, nature, politics, and social movements.

On the one hand, at the level of the individual, of course there's free choice going on. But on the other hand, from the perspective of the potential organizer, it's all statistics, at least after the first few dozen people, and setting aside "whales" or important benefactors. It's treating the people as just another natural resource lying around, under-exploited, like an oilfield or an ocean or a bunch of horny dudes. Individual horny dudes obviously make choices about whether and where to spend money on naked Internet girls, but to the naked Internet girls they're a non-uniform resource which gets exploited as appropriate. (Attention being roughly proportional to revenue, as I understand the market dynamics?)

I think this would capture an important truth, that a mass of people looking for change can be a powerful force, if they can somehow be harnessed to all work together.

That's no really new, it's a message that all democratic countries bombard their citizens with.

I think this is the core of the misunderstanding? I can see how that looks a lot more naive and idealistic than I meant, and it looks like the mention of Lenin failed to set the tone. A herd of wild cattle is a powerful force, but if you can manage to round them up and brand them, they're all going to be eaten (or otherwise exploited).

To rephrase a bit, I think that when there are a mass of people desiring a particular type of change, that presents an opportunity for entrepreneurs to recognize and exploit this unfulfilled desire. It's not always the first who succeed; sometimes later ones will do it better. And the nature of the desire is important, in that the presented "solution" needs to cater to it. I suspect that people who come up with an ideology and then look for converts, are going to be less successful than people who find a group of potential converts and then come up with an ideology that makes them want to join (Hitler's path, IMO, although he was a part of the group himself), or people who just start improvising and don't care what they say as long as it gets crowds to cheer their name (Trump's path, IMO). Marxism is something of an exceptional case, but I think this model can cover it.

I haven't read Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals", but from what I've seen, it describes that middle approach (the Hitler one). Sure, it talks about doing everything to help "the poor", but ultimately it's about constructing an organization with yourself as a leader, and acquiring power, and the choice of ideology is completely irrelevant. The organizer may even think that they're doing it for the benefit of the people (and it's probably more effective if they do believe this, on some level), but it still boils down to "find an untapped source of power, and build an engine that exploits it", in the sense of a deck-builder card game. On the one hand, I do care about having good cards, but on the other hand, they're just pieces of cardboard that help me win the game. Maybe the solution I propose is "equal pay for equal work", or maybe it's "gas the Jews", whatever gets my power-base motivated. If the leader is just out for power, from a certain perspective there isn't a difference.

Is that sufficiently cynical? :-)

I think I'd concede that naturally-occurring niches may exist. I think these niches probably don't get filled without some sort of elite-aspirant recognizing an opportunity however. Oil sitting under the Arabian desert didn't do anything until someone with the resources, connections, and know-how to exploit it came along. I also think that relatively narrow niches may be artificially expanded by elites, in the same way that say, De Boers helped create the diamond market. Good point about consumer capitalism; I think its fair to say that incentive structures have a way of cropping up everywhere, however much you try to keep them out.

not even the race-realists nowadays advocate for a return to slavery

Yes but not out of morality, it's because slavery isn't needed. We need higher wages for laborers, not slaves working for free. Same reason we're anti-illegal.

However we do think we need to send blacks back to Africa if we ever want American cities to be livable again.

WTF is going on in Korea?

Meta: I haven't posted in the CWT in a minute, Life gets in the way. This post is going to be mostly copy pasted content from elsewhere. I will attempt to consolidate some of it here. It's probably going to be a very sparse list compared to all the relevant pieces of context, but I attempt to shed some light and discuss nevertheless.

TLDR: The "Gender War" is a significant aspect of the Korean culture wars. And it seems to be more pronounced in Korea than any other society. I really want to know why. I think this bears studying given gender relations are deteriorating globally, and if Japan is 10 years ahead in neetdom, South Korea is definitely 10 years ahead in whateverthefuck dom this is. Their infamously low birthrate is also an elephant in the room, whilst we have this discussion.

Exhibit A

This culture war survey:

Page 12, We can see that Koreans most of all nationalities think there is significant tension between men and women. Koreans tend to top the charts for other questions as well, so it might just be the case that the Korean social fabric is especially frayed, or Koreans are just especially neurotic or self-critical.

However, it does seem that the social fabric is fraying like no other on multiple fronts in Korea:

Exhibit B

Just simple web searching. If something is in the air, people are probably talking about it. Or inversely, if people are taking about it, it stinks.

It does seem that the Gender War is becoming more "interesting". Not especially so in Korea however. But try the search term "reddit war $COUNTRY", and lo and behold, you actually get posts about it when you try with COUNTY='Korea'.

Some examples from the first page: https://old.reddit.com/r/Hangukin/comments/1708gpj/can_people_explain_to_me_wtf_is_going_on_with_the/, https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/18cnto9/whats_going_on_with_the_gender_conflict_and_it/, https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/18qlyqe/why_does_the_battle_of_sexes_seem_more_pronounced/, https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/19bvpjq/whats_the_deal_with_feminism_and_antifeminism_in/, https://old.reddit.com/r/SingaporeRaw/comments/192yymo/do_you_think_singapore_will_face_a_south_korean/

Exhibit C

"The incel election" Enough said? I don't think there is much other evidence required that this is a significant CW front in Korea.

Youtube video - Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War (You can disagree with thesis, I'm just linking to show its a thing people are picking up on)

Study - The Gender War and the Rise of Anti-family Sentiments in South Korea (You can disagree with thesis...)

Exhibited D

This is totally comprised of anecdotes, but I buy it.

Some comments from the reddit posts above: Common theme, Korean feminism dials the man-hate up to 11.

Answer: radical feminists are really, really, radical in Korea.

Interesting that you hear about how "young men are turning to right" all the time, but at least based on these, outside of SK the men are fairly stable, yes moving to the right but the graph is not very steep. On the other hand the women seem to be moving to the left at a much steeper incline, but nobody ever talks about this

Women's social media is a different breed of animal. Lab created.

Korea take feminism to ANOTHER level bro...

Being a westerner in Tokyo I've dated three Korean raised women and all three were absolutely, balls to the wall, rabid, men hating psychos who regularly voiced violent fantasies of what they'd like to do to Korean men.

All three were utterly confused when I'd tell them the kind of stuff they were saying wasn't acceptable in any way and would respond with "but you're a westerner, I thought you supported feminism".

Like no, woman, your idea of 'feminism' shouldn't be angrily ranting about cutting off dicks and sodomizing men. You can say three people isn't a large enough sample size to judge something by but I also think it's enough to be suspicious of whatever the hell they're branding feminism as over there.

So what gives? Why did the gender war hit Korea like a truck?

Korea is already on its way to extinction, so at least this won't be a problem for that long, but still, I am really left scratching my head. Are there any historical examples of this ?

One running theory other than the normie, "It's because they work really long hours hurr durr" (which does have a massive nugget of truth to it), is that Korea is especially unfathomably status obsessed. All that exam cramming, all that plastic surgery, it's all indicative.

I point out the above because most countries the gender war is more along the lines of "incel men" vs "feminists". Men are usually the active camp complaining about not getting anything from women, women complain about not getting anything from society, men take the aggressive stance. However, in Korea women are on the offensive as well, this seems unique to me.

This whole thing is getting crazy enough that it is even leaking into NPR on my commute and I've heard several stories about it from major news outlets. They of course are spinning it as the eventual chickens coming home to roost from having men that do zero child rearing and housework and also having the women work outside the home too (which is what they wanted!). But regardless of how they got there, they have a solid point. No one is going to willingly sign up for a life of wage slavery + all domestic tasks, that is fucking crazy town. You or I wouldn't do that!!! It is no wonder women are mad and opting out. It is the only rational option.

It is no wonder women are mad and opting out. It is the only rational option.

Yet few if any are pushing for a return to the majority of women being stay at home moms without careers.

Well no of course not. Women are people too and that sucks as a life.

and that sucks as a life.

Objection, arguing facts not in evidence. Plenty of women still live such a life an find it extremely rewarding and fulfilling.

Well then it sucks to be the kind of person that would enjoy life as a breeding machine + house servant. Maybe some people love it, but that is pretty close to being dosed with alcohol as a fetus so you'll enjoy being a Delta in a Huxley book.

  • -23

Women wanting "liberation" is a modern phenomenon, so unless the 96% of women in 1895 that were opposed to suffrage along with their ancestors for thousands of years were Huxley's Deltas it feels like you're projecting modern culture and mores onto the past.

So you want to be a house servant? Is that what I am hearing here? We don't live in the past, we live in a world of birth control and equal rights. The revealed preference is a lot less barefoot in the kitchen pregnant style living. You don't have to take my word for it. Why do you think birth rates are dropping like a stone?

Is woman wanting "liberation" a modern phenomenon or did they always want more control over their lives? If you made the mistake of educating one I mean. Mary Wollstonecraft was 1792 and she wasn't the first.

  • -16

we live in a world of birth control and equal rights.

For now. The only nations to survive will be ones that give up on the failed experiment of granting women equal rights

Ah yes, people with different preferences that aren't aligned with your politics are all malfunctioning mutants. Of course.

So you want to be a breeding house servant? Is that the kind of life you would chose for yourself? If you think it is a good one why aren't you living it? If you would like to I would be happy to employ you for child rearing in exchange food and a place to sleep! If you could also work 40 hours a week to be able to pay for my house that would be great too!

This is all mixed in with the recent population decline panic, which is another silly thing as human labor is going to be 100% obsolete inside of the next 2 decades.

Also my Huxley joke is actually hilarious and I'm upset you didn't chuckle at it. The motte is honestly far to serious most of the time. Lighten up people!

  • -12

If you could also work 40 hours a week to be able to pay for my house that would be great too!

I would remind you that none of your interlocutors AFAICS are advocating that women work full-time jobs as well as do all the domestic work. They are suggesting that women be stay-at-home mums.

The motte is honestly far to serious most of the time. Lighten up people!

It's serious because jokes and sarcasm have a tendency to escalate into yelling matches. This is actually to some extent written into the rules.

More comments

This is an interesting, arguably uncharitable take on motherhood. I think being a mom is the highest calling there is, right up there with being a dad. If one's perspective is that parenting is selfish or whatever, you know bringing a child into a life of pain, etc. at least that argument I understand. What I don't sympathize with is this idea that having kids and raising them (which yes includes cooking, washing, cleaning, folding, ironing, lather rinse repeat) is robotic mindless drudgery. I guess if your goal is sucking the marrow out of life for yourself that's probably true, but I never found that so appealing.

True enough, if only one person (the woman, and alone, without her own mother or anyone else) is doing everything in the home, that's a weird, unfair dynamic. I mean get up off the goddam couch and clean the tub, hey. That may be rather your point --not the idea of domesticity, but the inordinate burden on women to do it all and all alone.

I don't know to what degree tgis is true among modern Koreans. I'd offer anecdotes but those wouldn't shed much light I expect.

I think being a parent is cool too, but if you're expected to do all the house work, childcare and also work a job outside the home that is a terrible deal. That seems to be the expectation in Korea, so again, it is no surprise that a smart women won't sign up for that!

I think you agree that is a bad deal. If you look at the stats even here in the states women do a lot more of the childcare and housework even if they are working the same hours as men. That isn't to say I don't think men get a raw deal in a lot of ways regarding harder more physical jobs, forced military participation, etc...etc...but to claim that women were happy to be house slaves before someone learned them wrong is also disingenuous.

Is it the expectation In Korea? Certainly for hardcore traditionalists, though hardcore traditionalists wouldn't want the wife working at all. I am not convinced the current parenting age generation is so inclined, though it makes for a rich discussion to believe so.

More comments

Running a household used to be a complex operation requiring the deployment of a lot of different technical and personal skills as well as management and long-term planning. If modern labor-saving machinery and industrial techniques have obsoleted this role and made people unhappier, perhaps that might have implications for the obsoleting of further social roles and jobs via technology.

Good point! It is going to be interesting as every single human role is done better by machines. We'll be 100% obsolete. I am fine with that as I am pretty good at living a life of indolence and base enjoyment, I've never defined myself by my work. This will not be the case for many and I'm sure a lot of people will be made very upset.

Let me see if I can talk around all the words you're putting in my mouth...

When you give women the option not to be a stay at home mom...most take it. When they have the option to have fewer children, most take it. Hence the reduction in family formation and lack of children. Revealed preferences.

Also, talk about a straw man. Yeeeaaaash.

Funny that you posted this just yesterday, "If you want I can make up an arbitrary position, ascribe it to you, give you hell for not defending it, and then conspicuously stop responding when you point out that you've literally never said such a thing."

You are channeling Hlynka!

  • -12

And from the other side of the mirror- living around many people who think that the majority of women should be housewives without careers- almost all of them don't push for women to do all domestic tasks and think husbands should at least contribute even if for practical reasons most housework and childcare is going to be done by women.

Majority of people don't have careers, and never had. Being a grocery clerk, factory worker, some low paid service sector employee or lowest rung bureaucrat or manager or something else for 30 years isn't a career. It's a job.

They of course are spinning it as the eventual chickens coming home to roost from having men that do zero child rearing and housework and also having the women work outside the home too (which is what they wanted!).

Yes, it's what they wanted, but without social dislocation and other unintended consequences (heh). That is, I'm sure what feminist women generally assumed back in 1970 or so was that men will be OK with picking up the slack when their wives and girlfriends start abandoning their restrictive gender norms i.e. men will be willing to make dinner, look after the kids, go on parental leave etc. and women will like it.

No, being a housewife is the only rational option.

I'm very skeptical of the idea that South Korea's birth rate is a product of gender war. It just seems like a miserable place to live, where children are drafted into the rat race as soon as possible, forced into 4 A.M. tuition classes for exams they're going to write a decade later, coming home at 10 PM, then doing it all over again, until you eventually graduate, get a job and can inflict the same rat race on a new kid who has the misfortune to emerge from a South Korean womb. An endless labyrinth of status games that makes the experience of parenthood and childhood uniquely awful, even by the infamously taxing standards of East Asia.

It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.

One point of commonality between Korea and the West is that these stories of "gender polarization" are really just about sharp radicalization of women, and the author's need to coach that observation in both-sidesism for political correctness. There's a graph that circulates on Twitter frequently about how Western youth are supposedly polarizing sharply away from each other, with women becoming more left-wing and men becoming more right-wing, and if you actually look at the graph it just shows men becoming mildly more conservative, a change that is barely perceptible, while women are stampeding to the left.

It may be that the miserable nature of the South Korean lifestyle makes dating logistically difficult, and as a consequence men and women develop mutual hostilities simply because they have fewer opportunities to come into intimate contact with each other. But I'm just speculating.

This is also my suspicion about what's going on in the West. Not to the same degree or because of the same factors, but because social atomization drives people apart. This leads to fewer connections with other people, fewer relationships with opposite-gender people (platonic and romantic), fewer intimate connections with people you share a background with, alongside more internet doomscrolling, more online dating, more echo chambers. The main way men and women are coming into contact with each other is through online dating apps. And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.

It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.

And even the people who have success there (according to whatever their definition of that is), both men and women, regard it as a necessary evil.

It's no wonder men and women hate each other: they know each other only through the adversarial, hierarchical, soul-destroying apps.

I may be an extreme outlier in this but I’ve met, hooked up with, and dated a lot of women (and eventually married one) from dating apps and both me and the women I met for the most part regarded the experience as fun and rewarding. I’m close friends with a couple of my former partners and we’re all happy about it. It was not appreciably worse than meeting women in person. This was mostly in the Bay Area so maybe it’s an unrepresentative market for how good online dating is/bad in person dating is. I’d be happy to keep hooking up with bumble chicks if I hadn’t met my wife.

Every single time I use Online Dating in the past five years, the dates never happen. We match, we talk, I ask her out, she says yes, she bails, I ask her out again, she says yes, she bails again, I get the hint and stop talking to her. This is AFTER I lose weight and move to a major metro area.

My suspicion is that Korea is just a sucky place due to their lifestyle and that places which are sucky for fixable-seeming reasons(Koreans could just not do the things that make them miserable if they could figure out the coordination problem) are drawn to radical and generally bad ideas. You used to see it a lot with communism; tsarist Russia was genuinely worse off than its neighbors even if everyone expected it to catch up eventually. I'd hazard a guess that Korea has built-in antibodies to communism for obvious neighbor-related reasons and that it has no such antibodies to feminism, allowing it to run wild into radical man-hating.

In other words, Korean gender wars are a side-effect of the same factors driving down the birth rate. And I've pointed out before that people don't have kids if they expect it to be a miserable experience all around which for Koreans is a very reasonable and grounded expectation. I like to compare to rednecks in America who absolutely love being parents and have a replacement fertility. My tribe's TFR advantage isn't because of our better family values, it's because we expect to actually like it(well, kind of- I'm talking about the broader red tribe here and not about tradcaths specifically, that TFR is probably due to conservative family values).

and that it has no such antibodies to feminism [other than that mandatory military service thing], allowing it to run wild into radical man-hating.

Yes, that's called "being a fully mechanized nation". Most Western powers ran into this somewhere around the 1900s, and women were first granted rights above and beyond men (as in, "rights without corresponding responsibilities") in those nations around that time- you see that with the right to vote most prominently [without the corresponding duty to be drafted into a war they voted themselves into, something we see in Ukraine today], but prohibition and minimum-age requirements for brides are their doing as well.

I think the pedofascist was/is trivially correct when he made the point that these policies, from the start, are properly viewed as radical man-hating; tearing down the places they'll go after work and putting ever-increasing caps on the quality of women they can afford with no suitable substitute are not exactly pro-man things (worth noting 1984 begins with a description of "the only woman a middle-class income affords the average man is an ugly, infertile, prostitute", and then Winston finds a secretly-transgender [from a biological standpoint] woman who he has wild sex with before the Gender Police torture them to ego death; I believe Orwell predicted modern gender politics to a tee). In that light, first-wave feminists must have been motivated by the same hatred/anger that motivates third-wave feminists (and the white-knights for each wave similarly motivated), and it's always the legitimately transgender individuals that are used as tokens by said women only to later suffer from it (in this case, "the 1% of women who actually are competitive with the men want the right to pursue those opportunities"- something that would fit under the trans umbrella as 1900-1950s society would have understood it; today, the genders are reversed, where men are demanding the opportunities and privileges of women).

[Further effort post: the concept of transgenderism is coherent from a strictly biological standpoint, and our instinctive grouping of all non-straight-as-in-established-man-on-youngest-possible-woman sexuality into "biology should not predict this behavior therefore the people that do these things are malfunctioning" is also coherent, but the people who are transgender under this definition are not the people most people would claim it is today!]

But if the complete obviation of the biological male gender role was such an impending disaster, what let us avoid those consequences for so long? Well, the post-war WW2 boom pushed the economic balance in the West far enough towards men that it was the women who couldn't meaningfully co-ordinate to soak up so much wealth, but that was over by 1980 and the problem our great-grandparents failed to solve has returned to haunt us once again.

Korea, then, is experiencing this for the first time, in full force, being that they have only just made it to full mechanization (they weren't in a position to benefit from post-WW2 booms especially thanks to that civil war)... and being a US-occupied nation means they have to deal with the US' cultural outlook/propaganda, which is currently tilted in the gynosupremacist direction. It's probably worth considering how the Japanese managed to avoid this problem, but I think that was because they mechanized in that boom time and managed to lock in a "the genders aren't actually at war with each other" mindset (and their rule-following did the rest) [but they still haven't dodged the problem, because all the good gender relations propaganda in the world can't actually solve a problem of 996/economics].

The Koreans, by contrast, didn't make it in time- but they also happen to be blazing a trail (being a smaller nation) whose trajectory men (and women) in the wider West would be wise to observe, regardless of whether it fixes the problem or conclusively demonstrates it's not fixable.

And I've pointed out before that people don't have kids if they expect it to be a miserable experience all around which for Koreans is a very reasonable and grounded expectation.

I think it is true for Americans as well; states that have successfully kept angry/neurotic women from destroying the rights of parents to allow their children to enjoy life as much appear to have higher TFRs, even though their average income would take even more of a hit by having kids. Sadly I can't find a by-state breakdown of TFR for 1920 to prove that, so my evidence for that ends at the car seat thing.

without the corresponding duty to be drafted into a war they voted themselves into, something we see in Ukraine today

It sounds like a very American thing, to assume that all wars are something you vote yourself into.

I don't think Americans think that about most wars we get involved with, either. There's rarely a chance to vote against them.

There's a graph that circulates on Twitter frequently about how Western youth are supposedly polarizing sharply away from each other, with women becoming more left-wing and men becoming more right-wing, and if you actually look at the graph it just shows men becoming mildly more conservative, a change that is barely perceptible, while women are stampeding to the left.

South Korea is an exemption though, as far as I can tell.

Okay, but how bad is it really?

Looking at the Unherd article, for example. Their thesis: #MeToo caused radical misogyny and conservative backlash. Their evidence: one survey showing young men were unusually hostile to the current president. A second survey, published in 2019, saying they really disliked feminism. And then a smattering of demographic and dating stats which don’t really measure opinion so much as try to justify it.

If that’s the quality of evidence, I’m not sure it can be distinguished from garden-variety fearmongering. Hey, our students don’t really like Biden. Does that mean the Democrats are at a crossroads of anti[femin/egalitarian/Semit]ism?

On the other hand, SK apparently elected their antifeminist. That speaks a little louder. Has he actually acted on his alleged platform? Because this sort of narrative is what I’d expect to see from a smear campaign.

Okay, but how bad is it really?

Surely bad enough to result in probably the lowest fertility rate anywhere in written history. So yes, pretty bad, I think.

Correlation isn’t causation. I’d be willing to bet that their birth rates predate whatever this is.

Korea doesn’t have the lowest fertility rate anywhere in the world right now, though, does it? I think Hong Kong and Macau at least are lower, and maybe Taiwan as well. And while SK is lower than the PRC, it’s not massively lower. Really east Asia just has really low fertility to the point where Japan is an outlier high TFR nation.

Hong Kong is lower by a little, but the others are higher. Macau actually has a TFR of above 1...!

Exactly- SK has regionally-normal fertility, Japan and probably North Korea are high TFR outliers for the region.

Maybe... Japan is doing something right especially given the cards they've been dealt with.

My Korean wife seems 100% unaware of this but in her defense she spends most of her online time-wasting reading about domestic drama on a Korean coupon-clipping forum and a Korean credit card churning forum.

Apparently such time-wasting is also the norm among Chinese wives.

Is a Korean coupon clipping forum literally a place where Koreans talk about coupon clipping (and also apparently domestic drama???)???

It's literally a coupon clipping/deal-searching forum but there seem to be a lot of unrelated dramatic threads. I don't speak korean so I have no idea.

https://www.missycoupons.com/

As with anything sociological, an examination of the Korean situation is incomplete without an economic background.

  1. Wages have historically been low in Korea.
  2. Korea is a cutthroat meritocracy.
  3. Men (or their parents) are still mostly valued as "providers".
  4. Housing prices in Seoul, the only city worth living in, have almost tripled since 2018.
  5. This generation of women is the first generation to be fully entering the workforce.
  6. Buying a house is a precondition to marrying under Korean social norms.
  7. Koreans, in comparison to Westerners, don't like to violate social norms.

What 1 (low wages) + 2 (cutthroat meritocracy) imply is that Korean men have to work hard to get promoted to management if they want to support their family. This has historically taken the form of 60-hour work weeks (8 hours plus "voluntary" company dinners, Monday to Saturday). As women enter the workforce, the culture of company dinners has been pared back, and now it is 8 hours plus unpaid evenings if one wants to have a chance at being promoted to manager. (Women don't on average put in those hours, since 60% of them plan on leaving the workforce when they are married and have kids.)

Adding 3 (the social role of men as providers) means that their value is measured by the thickness of their wallets, and their wallets are on average not very thick, because 1 (wages are low) and their wallets are getting thinner, and less valued, because 5 (because women are entering the workforce).

Now owning a home is a precondition to marriage (and childbirth) in Korea, and this means that it is mostly the upper middle class which can afford to have kids. So you get a whole generation of women who were raised by their mothers in houses where their fathers were working 60-hour weeks to be that upper middle class. They grew up in material luxury, but their fathers would home drunk late at night after these company dinners and pass out immediately. They see their mothers working thanklessly in their home, barely time for a conversation with their fathers, and want none of it. Thus the mythology is born. "Korean men suck."

These women in the upper middle class have gone onto college, where they major in the humanities and are exposed to the imported concepts of third-wave feminism. Men are the oppressors, women are victims, and life sucks because of patriarchy. Life does suck. They try going into the workforce and see that wages are low and the culture sucks. Must be the patriarchy holding them back. (To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.)

Growing up in the upper-middle class with material opulence, these Korean women have high expectations for their quality of life, and instead of finding a marriagable high-status husband, their age-matched prospects are only poor men who are struggling to get ahead in the rat race. Then when they are looking for a husband, none of the available young bachelors have any money or free time. Nobody is buying that house! If they are schooled in third-wave feminism, the message is clear: "Korean men suck."

These feminist women go into jobs like journalism, where they write tons of articles about how terrible the men are, with no consideration for the economic constraints that got the entire society into this position. They hit age 30 (or 35) and are forced to marry by social forces (and that ticking biological clock). If they are marriageable, they end up settling for a man who they are not happy with, read HuffPost, and inhabit "mom cafes" online where they post screeds about how terrible men are. If they have poor personalities, they write screeds even more vociferously about their bosses and the men who rejected them. Somewhere, they read that foreign men are feminists and get the idea that foreigners will support them. (And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!)

(Women who were aware that their fathers were making sacrifices for them see the feminists going off the deep end and no longer feel comfortable calling themselves feminists.)

Young Korean men, on the other hand, see their fathers working 996, and instintively understand that their fathers are working as a sacrifice to provide material wealth for the family. They see that the women of their cohort (especially the self-proclaimed feminists) do not appreciate these sacrifices, and especially don't appreciate the sacrifice they made in lifetime to keep the country safe from the North Koreans. The women appear thankless and shrill. The men put their heads down and try to work harder to get ahead. If they are responsible, they save every last penny to buy that house when they get married.

The left-wing Moon administration rejiggers the housing market to try to lower housing prices, and ends up adding fuel to the fire and doubling housing prices in three years. The left/feminist wing also hushes up several cases of sexual assault by the left-wing mayor of Seoul, who commits suicide when the allegations become public. The right-wing candidate vows to abolish the "Ministry for Women and Family" (English translation: "Ministry for Gender Equality"), which is seen as a think-tank and jobs program for these radical feminists. In response mostly to housing prices but partly to the MfWaF who hate them and the hypocricy of the leftists covering up sexual assault, men in the next election vote for the right-wing candidate.

Korean journalists - especially ones who know enough English to write for foreign journals like CNN and the NYT - are largely drawn from those upper-class women who went through college in the humanities and were radicalized on third-wave feminism. The election of a right-wing government is portrayed by these Korean journalists (who never studied economics and don't want to talk about the rapey left-wing mayor) as a sign that Korean men hate women. (The actual surveys show that they hate "feminists".) Western media comes to believe that Korean men are sexists engaged in a gender war, as everything available in English is filtered through the lens of Korean feminists.

Edit: And as my Korean friend points out, Korean journalists frequently cite foreign (CNN, NYT, etc) articles about Korean gender wars to assert that these things are real, without thinking about the filter effect and the fact that the foreign journalists' friends are all upper-class English-speaking Koreans (i.e. filtered for feminists).

And boy the stories I have of what happens when they actually meet foreign men!

You can't write this and then not give us anything!

You can't write this and then not give us anything!

Check the quotes in the original comment, I suggest.

Sure I've read those, but I'm curious to hear more.

It's just the same old shit. They get their "information" about the West from clickbait trash sites, and conclude that Western men are different, when, in fact, men are just men everywhere, and women are just women everywhere. Also, women want fried ice.

That was about how much they hate Korean men; how are western men "different" to the degree that they don't deserve their dicks cut off? I don't read clickbait articles targeted at Korean women.

Apparently Korean women assume that they are feminist allies, and aren't icky betas, I suppose.

Fried ice what?

That's the point. Fried ice does not and can not exist. It's an old Arab proverb, supposedly.

If we can fry ice cream…

Haha. You fell for the bait! Ok, some anecdotes that come to mind now. Might add more later:

  1. Careerist girl in her early 30s spent years watching South Park. Gets really good at English (in a South Park drawl!), but remains single for years. Discovers the Man of Her Dreams on Tinder. Spends two months raving about how perfect he is, how Tinder is different in Korea. Then learns he was also dating three other Tinder girls.

  2. Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.

  3. Tall (= tough dating prospects) artistic (=open-minded) girl falls in love with a foreign guy. Everything seems to be going well, except he's not very patient about her lack of English fluency. He takes her home to meet his family ... and it turns out they all live on a trailerpark. Relationship survives until he goes on a date with another girl. When she does meet a guy who is patient with her, that's one of the points she brags to her friends about.

  4. Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".

  5. Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...

Staunch feminist sits next to foreign guy on the subway. Guy completely ignores her. She tries to get his attention, he keeps ignoring her. She gets up and starts berating him for "manspreading," threatens to take his picture and put it on Twitter. Incident resolves when he threatens to take her picture and send it to the police for harrassment.

It’s like a darker, grittier version of this scene… [trigger warning: anime]

Staunch feminist in her early 30s meets foreign guy. Everything is going well, except that he walks out of a movie when it gets to a particularly girl-power scene. She has a two-week identity crisis over meeting someone so "anti-woman".

Please talk more about this one. What did the identity crisis entail? Was she astonished that someone could be so "anti-woman" or was it more self reflecting on how her own actions made her look to him? Or something else?

Early 20s reader of The Ethical Slut finally finds the rich foreign gentleman she's been trying to snag. Comes back raving about how the first date was amazing, he must have spent $500 between dinner and the hotel, she's finally found the man of her dreams. A week later he has to go on an international business trip, and stops answering his phone. Oddly, his phone is ringing like it's still in Korea ...

To be fair, this behavior is genuinely puzzling.

Why? That’s not much money for a high earner and seducing a very desirable woman for a night and then moving onto the next one definitely beats almost any other alternative spending option in terms of satisfying the male psyche

Fair enough. When I first read it, I didn't notice that the story also entails boning.

To emphasize the point, men in their cohort who enter the workforce had their mandatory military service counted as work experience and so enter at a higher pay level.

Well, there's a rather self-evident political option to remedy this.

Buying a house is a precondition to marrying under Korean social norms.

Is there any society where owning a house/apartment is not generally considered necessary before marriage?

Is there any society where owning a house/apartment is not generally considered necessary before marriage?

Plenty of married couples rent? That's without going into the "living like a pack of sardines at your parents' place, possibly with your sibling(s) and their spouse(s)" arrangement that was pretty common in my parent's generation, even in Europe, and is likely still common in poorer parts of the world.

Plenty of married couples rent?

I'm sure they do, generally as long as they're still childless. Once they're not, I'm not sure most people see that as a viable option.

Tell me you're American without telling me you're American.

I'm in fact not American.

That's only managerial class and above Americans. Plenty of Americans have kids while renting, even in smallish apartments.

Is there any society where owning a house/apartment is not generally considered necessary before marriage?

Just across the yellow sea there is a quite similar culture that didn't have this expectation; in China the (male's) parents would typically buy a house when their child gets married - and subsequently move in with the newly married couple. Hence the preference for sons, since you'll get your adult child to take care of you in old age, whereas the parents of the woman just get a dowry.

The preference for sons in China goes deeper, as in older tradition the sons of a family perform the sacrificial rites due for ancestor worship. But it is true that the pragmatic aspect of this was of significant concern as well, enough for (no longer extant) jokes to exist about families being "robbed" by having many daughters but no sons.

Then again, go back that far and often enough the newlyweds would just live in the (husband's) family compound...

I'd guess that marriage and owning a house are generally somewhat correlated here, but I know a plenty of married couples with kids who rent.

My wife and I were married for nearly a decade before we bought a house. In the US.

It's not just the ownership that matters, it's that renting is frouned upon, housing loans are not cheaply available (30% down payment is common, IIRC), housing is treated as an investment, the closing price for typical condos is now 20x~30x the median annual salary. I only know one 20-30 year old who purchased a condo in the last 5 years without parental assistance (and the one guy sold his startup to a conglomerate for millions.)

In America you’re totally allowed to rent, and if you have a plausible story and one set of parents is willing you can live with them- my parents lived with dad’s family at first.

And there are plenty of societies(eg Albania) where owning your own home before marriage would be seen as highly unusual or possibly suspect. They’re not societies most people want to live in, but neither is Korea.

To me, this sounds a lot more plausible than “#MeToo did it.” The articles looked political first and theoretical a distant second.

What’re you basing this on? What gives you this impression?

Without doxxing myself, all I can say is that I am immersed in Korean life. My source is mostly synthesis of what people have told me over the years while talking to me candidly and first-hand observation while experiencing the rat race. In my workplace, I saw men putting their children to bed on Kakao Facechat. In my extracurricular activities, I met a few mid-30s journalist women who were writing for foreign-language outlets. I saw friends get married, be disappointed, and turn bitter, and know many who cannot afford to get married.

So you should treat the above as original research, almost anecdotal. I was trying to convey the economic and social forces which push men and women into discontent with each other (well, mostly a subset of women into discontent with men), but also the filtering effect of what gets to English-language media, and the citogenesis effect of the English-language media on Koreans' understanding of their own culture (which I think is despicable).

Thanks. I got the impression it was something like that.

Is the primary complaint of women in Korea really that the men don’t have enough money, then? That hasn’t been widely reported.

Yes, it doesn't add up, although the general narrative of the comment is fairly convincing. Simple anthropology tells us that roughly an equal number of boys and girls are born into upper middle class South Korean families. They have the same advantages in life. For every single woman with high expectations, there's a well-paid single man of similar social status.

Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were. Contemporary young UMC men also seeing their wages diluted by women's entry into the labor market and rising housing costs. The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.

Except the UMC-raised men don't have the same financial status now as the UMC women did when they were growing up; they're earlier in their careers and thus lower on the finance/status ladder than the women's fathers were.

It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?

The latter are actually double whammy, as higher rents hurts UMC men's ability to save for a home/family, and higher home prices means that their diluted savings don't go as far when it comes time to get married and buy a place.

Hence why in America women generally contribute to housing costs. I'm not sure about the statistics, but Americans mostly seem to buy houses when already engaged/married/ready to have a baby. Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?

Do they not in Korea? If not, why not?

I can't say about Korea, but in China there's a whole Thing about buying houses, and who pays, and who owns it in the marriage, and who gets it in the divorce. It's like someone took America, realized that we're all sappy romantic meme-infected morons, and solved for the equilibrium. Which turns out to be a ruthless financial battle of the sexes.

If Korea has gone further down the Neo-Confucian gender-role rabbit-hole than China, combined with the same Western personal freedom as long as you don't marry, no wonder it's such a nightmare.

Especially with the male oversupply (see: one-child policy and preference for sons), at least up till quite recently, owning a residence is considered the minimum requirement for getting a decent match in China, at least in the urban areas. It gets to the point where multiple generations might be investing in a property for a son so he can get ahead (admittedly not just in romance; also stuff like residency status and rights, but I am very far from an expert on this)

More anecdotally, I know of Chinese women who openly discuss/brag about what sort of make of car/house/whatever accessory they require before giving a man the light of day.

Not sure how the owning a house thing is doing with the property market still in freefall.

It seems like a person would have to be awfully stupid not to notice this about their own life?

People often are, particularly about personal preferences.

I'm sure you could find more, but even just a brief perusal gives me examples of this from the Atlantic in an otherwise unsympathetic piece. I feel like it's pretty well known even with only a relatively passing interest in Korea.

Two examples inside that article are that of an engagement getting broken off because a downturn in a business owned to-be-groom's parents spooked the to-be-bride and her family, and a late-50s university lecturer finding out that he wouldn't meet the salary demands outlined by Korean women now.

I'm coming here from the QC thread, and I must agree that this is an absolutely fantastic post. I was wondering why the gender divide was so huge in Korea, and this answered it quite nicely.

How did you get this info? Are you Korean yourself? Do you have friends that live there? Or is this all from reading articles/online discussion boards?

I think the question becomes why has the gender war not turned hot in Japan, which has similar economic factors?

I can't name sources in a hurry, and this might be a faulty explanation, but I think a partial reason of this is due to Korea turning super-neo-Confucian during the Joseon dynasty/period. This is most evident after the Qing conquest of the Ming, which the Koreans responded to by considering Qing China as not having political legitimacy*, and doubling down on their interpretations of neo-Confucianism; but strands of this are evident even earlier, when Korean scholars rejected Ming-dynasty innovations (e.g. the Lu-Wang school) in favour of elaborating on older models, most prominently from Zhu Xi. Even today you can see a much, much more obviously hierarchical system regarding personal relations present in Korea than in Japan or China, even counting pre-PRC China (edit: at least contemporaneously).

China, on the other hand, did have such reevaluations, and the Manchu conquest prompted significant soul-searching, resulting in things like the kaozheng school of thought. Japan's kangaku, likewise, did not hunker down in the same way Korea did.

I could easily see how a more hyper-Confucian society that's had a crash course in modern liberal democracy and capitalist markets would create sex-based resentment, especially if you introduce a dose of feminism into it.

*For further reading you could go look at how many Koreans at the time considered themselves to be sojonghwa and the real inheritors of Chinese political culture and civilisation, now that actual China was overrun by "barbarians". This was to the extent that, IIRC, Joseon Korea refused to use Qing dynasty regnal years as part of its calendar, and continued counting as if the last Ming emperor (?) was still in power. Also note that this was not entirely unique to Korea; there were politicians and thinkers in Japan and Vietnam who shared this opinion.

Some element of this after the "loss of China" in the 17th century likely contributes to Korean culture today. I've been told by native Koreans about how the older generations still sometimes say outright that "since the fall of the Ming there has been no worthy Chinese (persons)"; and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.

and there's always some loony Korean nationalist scholar, never taken very seriously, insisting on how this or that aspect of Sinosphere civilisation (from festivals to Chinese characters, so on and so forth) actually originates from Korea.

Oh, that's where this comes from! I've seen Chinese people complaining about this, but I never understood why it was a thing that the Koreans did, and it always struck me as bizarre.

I'll stress that that part is my own conjecture, and doubtless modern nationalism and fear/mistrust of the PRC plays into this phenomenon as well. But it seems unlikely to me that the historical background didn't contribute to this. And that the Chinese usually overhype whatever minor Korean nutter has to say for their own purposes as well, to the extent that the average Chinese is probably more misinformed about the actual state of understanding in Korea (where Koreans rightfully mostly relegate such hyper-nationalism as mostly batshit insane).

Then there are things that are just kinda...dumb, like the Chinese getting irate at the Korean dragon boat festival getting recognised internationally (honestly who gives a shit? It's like Italians getting upset about modern British celebrating a derivative of a Roman festival). That stupid thing about kimchi and paocai thing still confuses me to this day (not the background facts, but the sheer idiocy of it, as well as the initial irresponsibility of the Chinese press).

I'll file this away as an unconfirmable theory, then. :-)

If you mean that Koreans have nutters who claim Chinese things — and other things too, for that matter — are actually Korean, no, that's real. The Chinese do grossly exaggerate the extent of belief, of course.

The festivals thing I was thinking of was related to Lunar New Year. I'm going off this by memory, so couldn't find a source in time.

The Chinese character thing was something found originally here, where some Korean novelist and former(?)-professor expounds on the idea that actually proto-Koreans created Chinese civilisation before migrating to Korea (by equating proto-Koreans simultaneously with the Shang and the Dongyi). (Apparently the same person was also featured in a video here earlier this year where he more explicitly claims that Chinese characters are Korean. That video has been private'd, but some vengeful Chinese netizen has re-uploaded it)

(I also somehow found this looney tunes Korean guy claiming that English is descended from Korean?)

Again, these things aren't taken seriously by the (vast?) majority of Koreans, but they do exist (as do more mainstream but still silly nationalistic punchups). This is also not to elide that you see loony shit from the Chinese (and Japanese, and every ethnicity really) as well -- sometimes even from the state organs!

My conjecture is that some part of this historical revisionism has to do not only with modern nationalism and geopolitcal rivalry, but also a longer-rooted hostility that has fomented since the Qing conquest.

Don't worry, I know the nutters are real. It's just that I'm going to have to try hard to not get carried away with this cool new explanation that you provided. :-)

That's a good question, but I don't know anything about Japan.

Also, I somewhat dispute that the gender war has "turned hot" in Korea. I think this "gender war" mostly journos trying to make a big issue about gender, for the reasons outlined in the second half of my grandparent comment. Surveys in 2021 showed that in every demographic surveyed, "inequality between men and women" was considered less of a problem in 2021 than in 2016. Also, if you are not terminally online you won't notice any gender war. (But Korean society does tend to be terminally online, so most people are aware of some feminist/anti-feminist drama. )

I'd say the decisive factor was the armistice in 1953, and the Americans not leaving. The war was never terminated in a clear manner, and was instead transformed into the mess that persists to this day, with the DMZ and so on. Had the North Koreans been capable enough to successfully and swiftly reunify the country through force, as it happened in Vietnam, Korea today would be a more or less normally functioning, average Asian nation, as Vietnam is. This'd be preferable to the current situation. One consequence of American military presence was the widening exposure of the populace to American cultural concepts, such as radical feminism. Also, there wouldn't be any Sarah Jeongs in the US.

Another factor was the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in 1979, which the Americans probably had some role in by either abetting it or supporting it. If there was one South Korean leader after 1953 who had both the willingness and ability to turn the country into a more or less normally functioning Asian nation without the current social dystopia of implemented cyberpunk, it was definitely him. If given 5 or 10 more years, it might have worked. But it was not to be, and he was replaced by a stooge of Washington.

How do you know that a Korea ruled by the North would be a non-basketcase country, as opposed to just being actual-North-Korea-but-bigger?

I don't know. But that's what I consider plausible by looking at the one relevant historical parallel, Vietnam.

Someone told me once that Korea is a very trend-following society, perhaps more than any other country on Earth. Something comes along, it gets trendy, and then the entire nation gets crazy into it, for good or ill. Like, Kpop wasn't always a thing, it just exploded in the 2000s. They also have these weird food trends that seem to come and go like lightning (right now "salt bread" is a thing, with huge lines at popular bakeries. i have no idea why.)

This isn't a new phenomenon, and it also applies to religion. Buddhism spread to Korea in like 300 AD, and they immediately got super into it and it became the state religion in 372 and then was launched to other east Asian countries through Korea. Same with Taoism, and with Christianity in the 19th century, it just hits like a tidal wave. And, apparently, the same thing with Feminism and gender wars.

I would guess that it's just part of being a small, homogenous, tightly-knit country. Since they have their own language, they're a bit isolated from the larger Chinese and English speaking worlds. Culture just spreads and evolve really rapidly there. I guess it's sort of like how evolution happens fastest in small isolated populations, and much slower in larger populations.

It's not that small. If South Korea got teleported to Europe, it would be the 7th largest country by population. It is small by area and has a very high population density, though I'm not sure if urban population wouldn't be a bigger factor in ease of fashion spreading. And South Korea is surprisingly far from the top on that metric.

Its different though. Europe is all connected by the Eurozone, geography, and so many of them all speaking English. South Korea is effectively an island, walled off by the no-man's-land of North Korea, and no common language with any neighbor except really strange English

Salt bread would presumably be the direct translation of what in Japan is called 塩パン. It's pretty good, buttery salty goodness. But I wouldn't stand in line.

Factors Playing Into Korea's Gender War

Korea is susceptible to outside influence for a few reasons.

  1. Korea was a nation that occupied and had much of its culture destroyed during WWII and suffered enormous losses and destruction during the Korean war.
  2. Korea saw rapid economic development, transforming from one of the poorest nations to one of the richest nations in a few decades.
  3. Korea is a relatively small country, with most business and culture highly concentrated in the capital city of Seoul. Nearly 50% of the population live in or near Seoul.
  4. Korea has rapidly adopted the internet. Almost 98% of Koreans own a smartphone today, the highest in the world. Korea was quick to adopt the internet when it was able to and it has become a major part of daily Korean lives.

There are some other factors to consider that tie into the Korean culture war:

  1. There are huge expectations from Korean society. From a young age, Korean children are bombarded with expectations about education, dating, looks, physique, social status, success, etc. There is a reason Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Korean women have one of the highest rates of plastic surgery in the world. For example, a lot of Korean women (and even men) have their jaw bone cut and removed to restructure their face.
  2. Korean web culture and gaming/webcomic culture is a huge part of Korean lives. There is a reason the first professional mass-scale competitive esports, Starcraft, arose out of Korea of all places. So a lot of users are susceptible to changes/things in those spaces.
  3. Many Koreans are struggling economically, a point which is covered in depth in @rokmonster's response.
  4. Mandatory military service for Korean men. All men have to serve 1.5 years in the military (used to be 2 years until very recently). The compensation for military service is very little, so Korean men feel like they are penalized when trying to enter the workforce. Factor in the increased amount of women entering the workforce and men are starting to feel like they are falling behind.
  5. Factor these together and you end up with many Koreans that go to video games, webtoons, etc as a means to escape their highly stressful lives. So anything that can be seen as an attack on video games/webtoons/ etc. is going to be highly impactful. Factor in the shared culture and Korean's time/access to the internet and this leads to more explosive results and drama that bleed into Korean culture and life.

Here is an interesting comment I found on reddit with some stats:

Have you heard about Japan's herbivore men? That a large statistic of men aren't having sex or dating? Korea is worse. From demo 19-39 of age, roughly 75% of respondents see dating as a fear or dangerous. Reasons include: possibility of inflicted violence, gender discrimination, gender related crimes like falsely accused of SA (men) or becoming a victim of illegal recording (women), record low interest in marriage etc.

On a question "Is Korea is more favorable towards men or women?" Each sex accused each other of having the advantage and both believe they are the overwhelming victim. Historically, legitimate sexism against women did exist prevalently. But today, it's really a grey area for most developed countries where gender-specific issues do exist but it's the most equal the 2 sexes have ever been. Compare gender equality 50 / 100 / 250 / 500 / 1000+ years ago where women were second class citizens.

75% of young people are afraid of dating. That's a huge number. Korea had its own version of #metoo across many politicians, celebrities, etc, with some cases even ending in suicide (for both victim/accused). People are too stressed studying and working, they don't have the time to date. No doubt Korean internet/social media is having similar effects warping people's perspectives the same way it is doing to people in the west, and you also end up with Koreans that have warped views of the genders.

It's also interesting that both genders view themselves as the victim and that the other gender has unfair advantages. There likely is an element of truth to their claims, and this is a classic case of the grass being greener on the other side.

Megalia's Legacy And Influence On How Feminism is Viewed In Korea

This isn't the first time Korea's gender war caused huge controversies in the country. Megalia was a highly controversial feminist website that had a large influence on shaping Korean views on feminism during 2015 and 2016. According to Wikipedia, 50% of women in Korea considered themselves feminists and 25% of them attributed Megalia as the reason for it. That's 12.5% of women being influenced by a singular group, and supposedly Megalia was extremely full of misandry, with statements wanting to kill all men, calling men bugs, if they had a boy they would abort, celebrating actual stories of men being murdered, and other standard anti-men statements take up to the next level of extreme.

Just some examples of things members in the community did:

  1. A teacher encouraging a male student in middle school to commit suicide.
  2. Poisoning men with antifreeze.
  3. Kindergarten teacher indicating she wanted to have sexual relations with a male child.
  4. A more comprehensive list in Korean: https://namu.wiki/w/%EB%A9%94%EA%B0%88%EB%A6%AC%EC%95%84/%EC%82%AC%EA%B1%B4%20%EC%82%AC%EA%B3%A0

To try to keep things fair, here are some points in support/defense of Megalia:

  1. Statement of Megalia was satire to highlight how men talk about/treat women in Korea. They were taking what men said and just changing the genders around.
  2. Megalia brought to attention issue of hidden cameras in women's bathrooms.
  3. They raised awareness of violence against women, organizing around tragic events such as the murder of a women from a man who claimed he did so because the hated all women.
  4. Megalia shut down sites such Soranet, which distributed illegal pornographic material.

Here are some related drama that happened around that time related to Megalia that the west got some exposure to:

https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/4tk21u/id_like_to_share_a_disaster_happening_in_korea/ https://old.reddit.com/r/news/comments/4xummg/korean_actress_kim_jayeon_fired_by_gaming_company/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201225070116/https://np.reddit.com/r/manga/comments/4u5jbb/last_3_days_for_korean_manhwawebtoon_community/

To spare the details, there was a lot of controversy in Korea's internet, kdrama, gaming, webtoon spaces all tied to Megalia and feminism.

People made all kinds of attempts to tie Megalia and its influence to other related scandals. For example, in 2016 there was a huge political scandal involving then president Park Geun-hye being influenced/controlled by a shamanism cult. 2 million people ended up protesting and she later got impeached and arrested for the scandal. People online attempted to tie this to a conspiracy of hidden cabal of rich women in Korea using the media and politicians to support the ideas that came out of Megalia. Supposedly the Justice Party, the third biggest political party in outright declared public support of Megalia and members of Megalia infiltrated Korean news media, the Huffington post, politics to push their agenda. The source of this data is suspect so I would take this information with a grain of salt, but the point is that Megalia had such a huge impact on Korean internet discourse.

This is all past drama, but it had a huge net negative impact on Korean men's view of feminism. Even Korean women's support for Feminism began to drop due to all the controversy around it. More sensible feminists in Korea make sure to distance themselves from Megalia, but it seems to have left a permanent negative connotation of feminism in the eyes of Korean culture. If you look at recent trends, feminism has decreased outright support in Korea, such as the number of women in their 20s considering themselves feminist dropping to 31.3% in 2023.

Recent Korean Gender War Drama

I'm going to talk a bit more about the video brought up in the OP: Gacha Drama and the Korean Gender War

It's quite an informative video, although it misses some crucial context which is the information I covered above. It does seem like he covered the topic a bit in his follow-up video, but I don't have the time to watch it right now.

To summarize the video, there was controversy in a Korean gacha mobile game because a promised swimsuit skin (cosmetic purchase for a video game character) for the female character was a wetsuit, while the corresponding swimsuit skin for a male character was just a regular swimming trunk with his abs exposed. Gamers got angry and thought this was driven by feminist ideology and that their precious games were forced to be censored (remember how important games are to Korean culture?). They found a female artist on the project who had extremely feminist views (retweeting tweets from Megalia, except it was 5 years ago), blamed her for this, and pressured the company to fire her. However, it turns out this was completely false, the actual artist of the swimsuit skin was a male, and the main decision maker to give the female character the wetsuit was also a male. So to outsiders, it just looked like a group of gacha gaming incel men bullied a company into firing someone for political reasons even though said person's political views had no bearing on the decision the game company made.

Here is a decent writeup of another recent gender war controversy in Korea: https://old.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/18dz3je/least_biased_perspective_on_recent_megalia_hand/

Take a look at the hand sign in Megalia's logo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalia#Reaction_to_Gangnam_Station_femicide

While the official stance on the meaning of the hand sign is that it represents an equal sign, in reality, it was used as a way to insult men's penis size. It's basically a dog whistle much akin to the ok sign being a white supremacist symbol. Unlike the ok sign, which was a hoax perpetrated by 4chan, the Megalia hand sign was used by actual members of Megalia to insult men.

An online shitstorm happened about 2 weeks ago when an animation studio Ppuri (뿌리) was under fire because netizens discovered the infamous hand pinch sign in the promo video of Maplestory's Angelic Buster Remaster. At first netizens thought it may have been just a coincidence but upon digging into this studio's previous contract works for various gaming companies, more and more hand pinch signs were being discovered to no end (games: Maplestory, Dungeon Fighter, Blue Archive, Epic 7, Eternal Return etc). In many cases hidden within a single frame of a trailer.

Gallery of these hand signs found recently from just this studio.

However this hand sign controversy first appeared a few years ago with GS25's camping poster and a few other companies. The biggest difference between the incidents from before and the most recent one is that one of Ppuri's lead animator (Datso) was dumb enough to tweet that she worked on the Maplestory project. Revealing her past tweets and retweets linked to feminism and general misandry. Her tweet "I've never quit feminism, I'll keep doing it" has become a meme because of her phrase "은근쓸쩍 스리쓸쩍." Which I think is a really funny phrase but I have no idea how to translate it to English. Sneakily cunningly? So if you've seen the gallery and knowing this particular lead animator's political views, I think it's safe to say that it's no coincidence. It's also inconclusive to say that this animator is a Megalia user. Nevertheless the backlash has been significant.

Personally, I think this hand sign thing is blown a bit out of proportion, maybe some of these are intentional but I also think from certain angles and resting positions that pinching hand gesture can just come out naturally. Regardless, it's become a tainted symbol and something animators/game developers have to be conscious of in Korea now. Outsiders looking into the current Korean gender drama just see a ridiculous controversy, but they don't have the contextual understanding of how tainted feminism and anything associated with it has become in the eyes of the general Korean public.

I also don't think their concerns are completely unfounded even if you ignore the context. If you've been following gaming, you'll know about all the controversies related to gender/beauty that have riled recent produced names, especially from Western developers. There were controversies regarding body types, characters made to look ugly (such as in Pokemon Go), progressive storylines/ideas being pushed via Sweet Baby Inc. the list goes on and on. These trends can be argued to stem from a Feminist perspective. Stellar Blade is a recently released title from Korea that opted to not play into those tropes and instead allows a main character to be a conventionally sexually attractive female, but even that game now has a controversy around censorship. For Koreans looking at these developments on the West, it's not far a stretch for them to want to protect entertainment being produced in their own country from meeting such a fate.

Ultimately what comes to the West is highly filtered and the only reason these stories even come here is because Korean games/webtoons/tv shows/drama/kpop has a fan following. Actual gender/political war issues are less likely to make their way to the West because the number of people who would care about such things is significantly smaller.

I always feel that everytime I read about East Asian social problems, it’s extremely focused on highly educated upper middle class striving part of the population. But then what about the remaining 80%+ of the population? What do Koreans who don’t do well at school think? The ones whose parents just run a shop or works for the municipality or something? People who never thought about buying a flat in a good area anyway? Surely there is also a real massive drop in the fertility rates of such people as well and it’s not because they are off studying or working 80 hours a week?

Right. The Atlantic magazine article linked talks to a bunch of upper-middle class English-speaking Koreans, many of whom studied in the US (something very few Koreans ever do unless they come from rich families). The birthrate collapse can’t be blamed on them really, cities have been IQ shredders for affluent strivers for a thousand years, possibly forever.

Semi-unrelated, I remember reading several years ago that one of the causes of Japan's low birthrate, or just more of a general problem, was everyone moving into the big cities, emptying out the rural countrysides. Maybe something similar is happening in Korea, and the non-urban areas are depopulating?

Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):

Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?

The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.

In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:

Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.

There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:

Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.

I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.

Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").

Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.

There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.

Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.

I don't have anything to say directly on the content, but writers like Zizek who seem to try to make their writing as difficult to parse as possible in order to show off their vocabulary have always annoyed me. There are times when a big, unusual word captures something that a shorter word doesn't, or is more convenient than using a string of shorter common words to represent the same concept. But when you're having to take a second to understand a phrase, time after time, it's irritating.

I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.

Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.

Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.

In one hundred years your shitposts will be taken seriously by the intellectuals of the time.

If Derrida can do it, then anyone can. Post-modernism is the intellectual equivalent of a banana duct-taped to a wall.

I think the biggest issue is that he assumed all these ‘great’ thinkers of the past actually had a point.

He read their works and found value in them. You can also read his work, look at the claims he cites, and decide if it makes sense to you or not. There’s no confession of faith required, just reading and thinking about what you read, same as you do in many other contexts.

Saying that Adorno and Horkheimer said something isn’t a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place.

No one thinks that simply citing a claim from a canonical text makes it authoritative. Everyone who writes philosophy is acutely aware that, for every historical philosopher they admire, there are legions of other philosophers who think that guy was an idiot, all his arguments were trash, etc. No one has any illusions about anything being authoritative.

Citing a claim is just you telling the reader where you got it from, nothing more. It’s still on you to evaluate the claim, check the primary source if you want, etc.

I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel exactly the same way as you, that it's all just a gigantic tower of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism using big words to intimidate normies while not actually proving anything. Other times I think... there might something to this. I think the way it's supposed to work is like a big aggressively-growing business. They can't possibly explain the entire market/all of society, and they know there will be a lot of mistakes along the way. Still, they do their best to make a coherent plan, and muddle along through, and as long as it's more right than it is wrong it will make progress. It's a way to deal with incredibly difficult problems that are just too massive to handle in a simple, rigorous, step-by-step "scientific" way.

But that does allow for a lot of bullshit to get through too... it's hard to tell!

There are plenty of philosophers like Hume, who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, or the late Daniel Dennentt, who aren't building on this pile of nonsense.

There are also various social scientists, historians and other academics who just roll their eyes at this nonsense. There are prominent ones like Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins who even poke the hornets nest from time to time.

It's not hard to tell, there is real stuff being discussed it's just not being discussed by this inbred movement within academia.

OK but the two philosophers you cite are both dead, who social science is really a different field. I thought we were talking about humanities and continental philosophy here? Do you just want to dismiss literally all of modern humanities as nonsense?

These philosophers are talking about stuff that overlaps with social science and science in general. Philosophy isn't some separate world where you can say whatever you like. It is bound by the same rules as everything else. If you are making a point about how humans operate you are making a point that overlaps with economics, sociology, history, psychology, etc. Continental philosophers often make claims about humans that go against what we know about those areas, not to mention claims about physics or mathematics. Sokal makes a big deal in his debunkings of post-modernism the ways that they used ideas from mathematics and physics incorrectly.

'I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathushtra, one who hates the Daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura'

Continental Philosophy is, to a great extent, un-rigorous sociology and social psychology. Talking about social science in the same breath is just accepting that fact.

If you’re having trouble with the linked Zizek piece, that’s probably just due to unfamiliarity with the ideas (they’re largely remixed from earlier texts) or the writers cited, because on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.

Zizek’s big heroes Lacan and Hegel are much harder to parse than Zizek. So if he really wanted to make his writing more obscure, he’s intimately familiar with a good model to follow! But generally I’d say his writing is on the clearer end for continental philosophy.

...on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.

I didn't even finish the first sentence before finding "...his thought is more than ever enabling us to see in a new way the horrors of..."

What are your standards for unclear writing??

What are your standards for unclear writing??

Hegel can be unclear at times:

In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. – This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. – In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility.

The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity.

There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx

And, you know, that other guy.

I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.

EDIT:

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely

This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).

Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.

It's truly astounding how many bad ideas and practices Hegel is responsible for. His "influenced" list is a who's who of the worst of the worst in philosophy. @non_radical_centrist below rightfully bemoans the "difficult to parse" style of certain philosophers, and there is perhaps no greater offender than Hegel. Kant isn't particularly concise, but pull up The Phenomenology of Spirit next to The Critique of Pure Reason, and the difference is night and day.

Hegel

Seeing as you're conversant with what to me seems like insufferable turgid nonsense, what do you make out of the claims that Hegel is being misunderstood and misclassified ?

Thus far, however, the most influential English-language account of Hegel’s Hermeticism is Eric Voegelin’s. In his essay, “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a New but Ancient God’” Voegelin admits that “For a long time I studiously avoided any serious criticism of Hegel in my published work, because I simply could not understand him.” The turning point came with Voegelin’s study of gnosticism, and the discovery that, “by his contemporaries Hegel was considered a gnostic thinker:” Voegelin goes on to claim that Hegel’s thought “belongs to the continuous history of modern Hermeticism since the fifteenth century."’ Voegelin’s principal statement on Hegel’s Hermeticism is a savagely polemical essay, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” referring to the Phenomenology of Spirit as a “grimoire” which “must be recognized as a work of magic — indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.”

Voegelin’s claims are unique in that he does not simply claim that Hegel was influenced by the Hermetic tradition. He claims that Hegel was part of the Hermetic tradition and cannot be adequately understood apart from it. Unfortunately, however, Voegelin never adequately developed his thesis. He never spelled out, in detail, how Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. Voegelin has, however, encouraged other scholars to develop his thesis more systematically (and more soberly). David Walsh, for instance, has written an important doctoral dissertation entitled The Esoteric Origins of Modern Ideological Thought: Boehme and Hegel (1978), in which he makes strong claims about Hegel’s indebtedness to Boehme. Gerald Hanratty has also published an extensive two-part essay, entitled “Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition” (1984-87).

Recommended watching of Derrick Jensen with regard to the libertine (and Sadist) currents of anarchic currents of anti-traditionalism (leftism) from pre-modernity to the present here. This video goes into how there has always been sort of an ‘antinomian’ side of society seeking to transgress all normative cultural laws since the beginning, looking from Diogenes as an example from within the Greeks and then moving further through the Enlightenment era and into modernity. Zizek’s thesis is one that is interesting, since Kant separating the spiritual from baseline reality and the causal-nexus could lead to such a ‘break’ analogous to the libertinism of the Gnostics, with the gnostic-mindset separating the spiritual from the physical thousands of years earlier, subsequently participating in such debauchery that certain named sects have just been assumed to have not existed due to how much sadism would have been involved. The distinction here is that such debauchery is obviously inherently reactionary towards the nomology of society, whereas rightism taking the status of the ‘counterculture’ is not as remotely libertine, meaning that it’s not really appropriate to say that leftism supplanted the nomology of society but instead corrupted it, as some sort of industrially-facilitated auto-immune disorder as opposed to anything else, with rightism in modern society basically being the delayed and weakened immune response.

It’s not inappropriate to say that the death machine of Auschwitz was the immune response to the libertine nature of certain communist and anarchist movements in Germany as post-enlightenment and industrial projects. The whole ‘Weimar Germany was a haven for transgender people!’ is an example—it’s just that the traditional mode of history is that once the ‘tradition’ gets corrupted by antinomian currents the entire thing gets blown up and millions of people die on average, whether by starvation or shooting or sterilization, etc. The reason why there was no morality there in order to stop Auschwitz from happening was indeed because of Kant and the Enlightenment project at large, but in spite of what they had brought even though that spiting was in its context. This same ‘antinomian’ spirit was seen in a Jewish context too, through Frankism (essentially a form of Gnosticism), which has been related to the Frankfurt school by a few people. Modern accelerationists are symptomatic of this, too.

Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that.

The nuanced version of this is less concerned with individuals changing their minds and more concerned with generational succession and coalitional realignment.

In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation), but while they were weak their immediate goals coincided with liberals' and they needed liberals' help to achieve them, so the coalitional rhetoric catered to liberals. Now that SJers are more numerous and powerful, and have already picked the low-hanging fruit, they have run out of common goals with liberals, and don't need the liberals to maintain a shot at power, so they kicked the liberals out of the coalition so that they could pursue their more illiberal goals. Meanwhile, the Moral Majority is no longer a majority and now needs the liberals, and also their most immediate goal of reversing SJ excesses is shared with liberals, so they've started including liberal things in their rhetoric.

In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation),

To poke slightly at this one aspect: perhaps the movement started in the 90s and early 00s with adult 3-foundationers, but because of institutional capture, a generation of 6-foundationer children grew up influenced by this ideology (instead of the more natural-to-them 6-foundation traditional conservatism), and they fleshed it out into a full 6-foundation system of its own.

What are these foundations? Why are there three versus six? I'm not familiar with this terminology.

I'm pretty sure this is referencing moral foundations theory.

Yes, moral foundations theory. It's not the most grounded theory, because the foundations were largely eyeballed from initial data and then expanded based on feedback and discussion, instead of being chosen by some sort of factor analysis. And if someone does enough research on this to put it on solid ground, "three" and "six" are probably not what the result will be. But they're good enough for a shorthand.

The original book is interesting. It's dated, because it came out shortly before SJ hit, and it didn't anticipate SJ at all. But it's prophetic, because its thesis explains exactly why SJ is the way it is. And then there's the last section, which isn't talked about much, but which strikes directly at the heart of the rationalist project. It suggests that our capacity for rational thought is actually a capacity for rationalization and rhetoric, evolved to help us form strong coalitions with other humans, to help in intergroup competition. And that it's entirely incidental that this also happens to allow us to think rationally about the world, although it might be inevitable (as long as the simplest model is also correct). Which has some implications about LLMs, too.

As the others said, moral foundations - care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.

Everyone cares about the first three, but WEIRD (white/educated/industrialised/rich/democratic, and especially autistic) people care much less about the last three (while caring more about care/harm), which generates liberalism (and is why liberals frequently fail ideological Turing tests for conservatism, because it's harder to hypothetically add things to a moral compass than to remove them).

As @fishtwanger said, Haidt's book laying these out is dated because it predates SJ. My best working theory of SJ is that it's what happens if you try to cram 90s liberalism down the throats of people who are six-foundation-inclined; they will take superficial features of it, connect them to the missing foundations, and produce a bizarro-world morality that has all six foundations but lacks coherence and is divisive rather than unifying.

As I said above, this is a bulverism; it's an explanation for "why would people believe this crazy thing despite its craziness" rather than "what is the thesis of this thing and is it true". I don't like bulverism, and I don't like thinking of people as, well, morons susceptible to memetic effects. But it's the most sense I've managed to make of SJ.

I wouldn't call the 3-foundationers SJers; I'd call them "90s liberals" or something (and there were 6-foundationers earlier than the 90s, just not in large numbers). But yes, that's my working bulverism of SJ as well.

It reminds me of the theory that young children form a creole language based on an adult pidgin.

That's the definition of a creole, yes? A pidgin spoken as a mother tongue.

Last I heard, that was the generally accepted theory, but like pretty much everything in linguistics, it's always being poked at.

Has Zizek ever put out any idea that had any tangible effect on the real world? i.e. some people read him and got influenced by his thoughts and imposed them onto some political structure with some non-significant effect?

His whole shtick seems to be to impress midwit social sciences students who don’t quite understand what he is trying to say but think he must be important because of this.

Also his jokes are funny once in a while

Has Zizek ever put out any idea that had any tangible effect on the real world?

You could ask the same question about the majority of academics in both the humanities and STEM and the answer would be "no". So it's not a very interesting question.

That being said, Zizek is reasonably well-connected and is e.g. friends with Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, so I wouldn't be surprised if he influenced the thinking of someone in power at some point.

A lot of European leftist politicians will know of him and have read at least some of what he’s written. That’s not a huge amount of influence but probably more than most successful philosophers have in the 21st century.

The most influential modern philosophers among politicians will be neolibs with very mainstream books like Stephen Pinker. But that’s questionable ‘influence’ really.

Columbia protests and the "right side of history"

A tremendously dumb argument, especially when made by woke people

[A tweet reading “Is [sic] is amazing how the protesters are always right 50 years ago and always wrong today.” @Will_Bunch]

In reaction to the ongoing pro-Palestine protests at Columbia University, a lot of people I respect have shared the above tweet. I don’t have especially strong opinions about the protests themselves, but I uncritically support the right of political activists to protest for any cause they choose to, and think that the Republicans (such as Greg Abbott) trying to prevent them from doing so are pathetic, cowardly and shamelessly hypocritical.

First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).

[By Will Bunch’s account, heroes unappreciated in their lifetimes.]

No: I’m sure that what Mr. Bunch meant is that all of the protestors from fifty years ago who are currently considered to have been on the right side of whichever political issue they protested were deeply unpopular at the time. This is probably true, but essentially useless when gauging the relative virtue of current political movements, because of survivorship bias. If there were only two sides to every political issue and the less popular one always came out on top in the judgement of the future, one could accurately predict which side of a current political issue would “win” purely based on which one had the lowest approval ratings. But, of course, there aren’t two sides to every political issue, many political activists protested for causes which were deeply unpopular at the time and remain so to this day, and so the category of “protesters who protest in favour of highly unpopular causes” is bound to include political causes which go on to be viewed in a generally positive light and political causes whose popularity never improves from a low baseline. (For a historical example, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists never fielded any successful election candidates and their peak membership was only 40,000 people. More recently, to the extent that the riot in the Capitol on January 6th was a “protest”, most Americans think it was a bad idea, and I hope it stays that way.) A more accurate rephrasing of Bunch’s tweet might read: “Of the people who protested for various political causes 50 years ago, it is amazing how most of them were generally considered wrong at the time and a small subset of them are now looked upon favourably in the popular imagination.” (Not as catchy, but it does fit into the 280-character limit!)

But the tweet isn’t really about historical protests: it was tweeted about the Columbia protests, the implication being that, fifty years from now, historians (and society more generally) will look upon the protests in a favourable light. The tweet is hence just the latest example of that tiresome argumentative trope that woke people trot out for essentially every political issue, the assertion that their support for this or that political movement places them on the “right side of history”.1

All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow. But I’ve always found it especially strange when woke people in particular make the “right side of history” argument. I’ve never been able to put my finger on quite why, until the tweet above got me thinking about it.

The reason being, historical revisionism is woke people’s favourite pastime. There’s nothing woke people enjoy more than taking a historical figure who enjoys a high level of approval in the popular imagination and demanding that we reappraise their moral character, even to the point of completely reversing it: not merely that such-and-such was a more complex and flawed person than is widely believed, but that he was actually a monster. The woke exist to take the wind out of people’s sails, never forgoing an opportunity to remind people around them that Their Fave is Problematic, actually. It’s such a quintessential part of the woke playbook that even The Onion poked fun at it; or think of that wonderful scene in Tár where the “BIPOC pangender person” says they can’t enjoy Bach’s music because of Bach’s unrepentant misogyny. Take just about any historical figure who is widely admired in one or more Anglophone countries, and I guarantee you I can find a woke article in a mainstream publication arguing that he or she actually sucks (usually for reasons relating to the woke faction’s monomaniacal fixation on race and/or sex), e.g.:

(If you really want a laugh, turn this technique back on them. Next time you see some twentysomething university student reeking of weed wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, point out to him that the man in question once asserted “The negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities”.)

I’m not even arguing that the woke revisionist accounts of the figures listed above are factually wrong or uncharitable (I certainly have no interest in defending Churchill from accusations of genocidal white supremacism, or Reagan from accusations of unabashed hatred of gay men). My point is that, once you recognise that morally atrocious people can go on to become near-unanimously revered both by scholars and in the popular imagination, it completely neuters the case for “the right side of history” being a useful guide to the moral virtues of present-day political figures or movements (or lack thereof), even assuming that one could accurately predict how these entities will be viewed in the popular imagination of the future.

To put it more plainly, woke people would have us believe both that:

1)Many historical figures who by popular and academic consensus are currently considered moral heroes, were in reality atrocious people.

and

2)In the future, popular and academic consensus will hold that the woke movement of the early 21st century was morally heroic.

The first premise is unassailably true, the second remains to be seen. But even if both premises are true, this doesn’t even come close to demonstrating that the woke movement actually is morally heroic. So in the future, historians and society more generally will look upon the Columbia protesters in a favourable light. So what? By the moral and epistemological standards espoused by woke people themselves, a popular consensus that Alice was a good person does not remotely imply that Alice actually was a good person. If Winston Churchill was an irredeemable monster who went on to be considered the greatest Briton who ever lived, why couldn’t this also be true of (to pick the first two woke Britons who popped into my head) Humza Yousaf or Diane Abbott? Not to say that either of these people are irredeemably awful, but there’s literally nothing in the woke framework which contradicts the notion that they could be and subsequently go on to be generally considered paragons of virtue.

This is the problem with employing postmodernism as a rhetorical device. Once you’ve done your best to redpill your listener by telling them that a widely admired figure was actually a crypto-fascist pederast Nazi sympathiser and the establishment don’t want you to know about it - following that up with “the establishment will look upon our movement in a favourable light” doesn’t seem like much of an accolade, even if it’s an accurate prediction. “So let me get this straight: you’re saying that history books have always been written by biased historians beholden to special interests, who systematically lionize awful, wretched people and ignore or gloss over their most atrocious moral failings, provided the person in question helped to advance the historians’ own political agenda. But the historians of the future (who by inclination and temperament will be no different from the historians of the present or the past) will look upon your political faction in a favourable light? Wow, what a ringing endorsement of your political faction! Sign me up!”

And this brings me to my final point. Although “the right side of history” sounds like it’s appealing to the listener’s moral sensibility, it’s really little more than a veiled promise and threat. History is written by the winners, so an assertion that supporting this or that movement puts you on the “right side of history” is really just a prediction that your team will win. That’s all it is: “my team is going to win”. Try rephrasing it in your head: “I support gender-affirming care for minors because I predict that my team will win” doesn’t sound half as noble as “I support gender-affirming care for minors because I want to be on the right side of history”, now does it? What the “right side of history” promises is that, if you join our team, historians will write hagiographies about us and forgive all of our worst sins. And if you don’t join our team? We’ll have no choice but to smear your team as depraved monsters with no redeeming features to speak of. Nice reputation among future generations you’ve got there - it’d be a shame if something happened to it.

1I had a feeling that the specific wording of “right side of history” had fallen out of popularity in recent years, and Google Trends seems to bear that out. That massive spike in 2019 appears to be the release of Ben Shapiro’s book of the same name (lol).

Woah, what happened to the formatting there?

All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow.

I had a similar insight in an old, now deleted, comment. Allow me to repeat it for posterity:

Lacking (or refusing to use) the rhetorical condemnation of hellfire and the violence of the noose, the language that comes out when modern progressives hate their interlocutor or feel prone to self-justification involves, in some way, the hatred or approval of the future: "the right side of history," "your children will hate you," "the future is female," "let the elderly bigots die, then we win."

Now, I think their take is bogus, even if one agrees with their view: as I've argued before, history is a fickle mistress, and I think it is much more likely that "history" or social consensus will condemn all of us for some bizarre thing none of us realize than to affirm the entirety of any one of our belief systems.

And if your views are defined by social consensus, or what we anticipate the social consensus to be, then are we truly philosophers? Are we not the same as any witch-burner or troglodyte convinced that the world will not change from what we anticipate? In this sense I fear the progressives who follow this chain of thought have become the very thing they swore to destroy: hegemonic oppressors.

No one in the America of 1900 would ever imagine that two men and two women would ever be permitted to have sexual relations with each other, let alone that they would be not only permitted but encouraged to couple up and call it marriage. Now, just to be clear, I'm not saying that's a good argument against it! But it certainly demonstrates that what is imagined about the future by the past doesn't always work out. Things change, now more than ever, and the progressives pushing for radical social change while believing they are entirely on the "right" or "winning" side of it are acting, in my view, incredibly foolishly.

Robespierre didn't think the French Revolution would conclude with his head on the chopping block, or with the establishment of a dictatorial empire. But it did. Neither did Lenin believe his great people's revolution would end with a personality cult and a dictatorship -- not of the proletariat, but of his general secretary, the guy who took notes at meetings. But it did. You push for a revolution for the people, and sometimes what you get is a new regime just as wicked as the old. Different words, but the same melody.

Woah, what happened to the formatting there?

I wanted to put in a horizontal line to separate the body of the post from the footnotes. If you neglect to put a paragraph break between the preceding paragraph and the four hyphens, it treats the entire paragraph as a header.

Ian Hacking's Rewriting the Soul discusses how modernity reconceived people as their memories, instead of e.g. an immortal soul unimpacted by general experiences. Thus trauma, history etc. come into play. This "right side of history" blends well here. He also uses a concept "acting under description" for the reason something's done (demonic possession, trauma, because of bipolarity etc.) Very clearly, these people's worldview sees them embodying the wheel of history inexorably plodding....

Perhaps this relates to the "axial revolution," where people began to conceive of history as something that progresses instead of repeating in cycles? Maybe also ideas of reincarnation and the afterlife, from Ancient Greece to Ancient India.

All the “right side of history” framing boils down to is a prediction that future popular consensus will judge Political Group X favourably. I think this argument would be profoundly weak and fallacious coming from any political faction: how arrogant of anyone to think they can accurately predict what the people two generations from now will believe, when they can’t even reliably predict where they’re going to go for lunch tomorrow.

It's not an absolutely terrible argument when used to warn others to really attend to the possible risks they're taking. Patrick Henry had an absolutely powerful speech at the Virginia Ratifying Convention against the ratification of the Constitution:

In his final speech at the ratifying convention, Henry extended the stakes beyond America to the world; indeed, the heavens: He [Madison] tells you of important blessings which he imagines will result to us and mankind in general, from the adoption of this system—I see the awful immensity of the dangers with which it is pregnant.—I see it—I feel it.—I see beings of a higher order, anxious concerning our decision. When I see beyond the horizon that binds human eyes, and look at the final consummation of all human things, and see those intelligent beings which inhabit the ethereal mansions, reviewing the political decisions and revolutions which in the progress of time will happen in America, and the consequent happiness or misery of mankind—I am led to believe that much of the account on one side or the other will depend on what we now decide.

At about this point, the stenographer noted, "a violent storm arose, which put the house in such disorder, that Mr. Henry was obliged to conclude." Archibald Stuart, a delegate to the ratifying convention, described Henry as "rising on the wings of the tempest, to seize upon the artillery of heaven, and direct its fiercest thunders against the heads of his adversaries."

Of course, maybe you are right, because:

The artillery of heaven was not enough. The next day, June 25, the convention voted 89-79 to ratify the Constitution.

In some ways, the tweet is not wrong. Protesters at elite universities will be tomorrow's leaders. They will be on the "right" side of the history not because they are morally right, but because they will be able to shape history to their whims.

The Ivy League protests are not a street movement, they are an elite rebellion.

And in that way, it's really no different than the Vietnam protesters who shared the same elite characteristics. As early as 1966 Normal Mailer noted how the protestors were upper class while the policemen they fought were working class.

Sadly, these benighted and often mentally ill children are our future leaders. They will no doubt treasure the memories of their "rebellion" in 30 years as they sit comfortably inside the halls of power.

And in that way, it's really no different than the Vietnam protesters who shared the same elite characteristics. As early as 1966 Normal Mailer noted how the protestors were upper class while the policemen they fought were working class.

Indeed, actual working class protestors around the Vietnam war were sometimes allowed by the police to rough up the hippies far worse than the cops ever would.

In some ways, the tweet is not wrong.

I think the tweet is dead wrong. It makes a claim of fact, that is a universal generalization, that is not true, and that is not usefully close to being true.

Protesters at elite universities will be tomorrow's leaders. They will be on the "right" side of the history not because they are morally right, but because they will be able to shape history to their whims.

I'm not sure protestors at Harvard, MIT or Columbia will be tomorrow's leaders. Yale's got better chances.

Huh... that was not my first thought upon seeing your username, but I suppose it does check out...

TBQH, the username refers to my interest in fantasy novels and (at the time, nearly 20 years ago) fungi.

And, of course, there's the question of, what if the world becomes Amish?

When the correctness of an idea is measured by what the final opinion of it is, well, that's rather hard to evaluate when there's still time to go. It seems entirely possible that history might not be moving always in one direction, Yarvin notwithstanding.

And indeed there are historical examples of backlash moving society against liberalizing trends; that's what the famously strict Victorian norms came from. Both the 50s baby boom and the 90s mini-baby boom might also be arguable examples, but I think economic factors dominated there.

By itself, "the right side of history" is clearly fatuous, yes. It assumes firstly what the people of the future will believe, which we obviously cannot know (and is likely to be diverse and contested regardless), and secondly that the beliefs of these hypothetical people of the future will be correct, which obviously may not be the case.

I think you have to factor in double standards on the "your fave is problematic" argument, though. There are, I think pretty clearly, major figures in the history of left-wing politics who seem just as cancellable. Marx wrote awful things about Jews. Beauvoir and Sartre were sexual predators. Che Guevara was, well, Che. The left has many heroes whose feet are just as clay as those on the right. So I think at least something about the argument has to do with what we envision the people of the future caring about - Marx is good because his politics were (supposedly) liberatory; Churchill was bad because his politics were about preserving Britain's imperial power. The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.

Thus with examples like Lincoln - yes, there are people who point out that by modern standards Lincoln was terribly racist, but widespread left-wing approval of Lincoln is acceptable because Lincoln can easily be fitted into an overall narrative of progress. Lincoln had his flaws, but he tried to point the motor in the right direction. Churchill doesn't get that sympathy because he was trying to point the motor in the wrong direction, i.e. towards the preservation of the British Empire.

As such I think a driving concept here is that of progress. It's MLK's "moral arc of the universe". The natural course of things is for society, customs, norms etc., to improve, those who hasten that improvement on are goodies, and those who oppose it are baddies.

Now, I think it's only possible to believe in this moral arc if you are extraordinarily selective about the movements and social causes you consider. Everything else must be dismissed as aberrant, a temporary setback, even just a blip, in an overall course of ascent. But it nonetheless seems to be the case that people are that selective. We take the movements of which we retroactively approve and declare them to be history on the march; and we ignore those movements of which we do not approve.

Take an issue where the course of history over the last few decades seems to skew conservative - gun rights in the United States, for instance. Over the last fifty years, gun rights have expanded, as has gun ownership, to my knowledge. Imagine you jumped in and said that this is progress, the moral arc of the universe, and that those who support expanding individual rights to own and use weapons are on the right side of history. How far do you think you'd get?

The judgement isn't made just on the basis of a past figure's actions or beliefs considered impartially, but rather whether the person's overall agenda is seen as contributing to or opposing an overall agenda, which is projected backwards into the past.

"We have Roko's Basilisk at home"

This one's actually scary though, especially if your contributions have been reevaluated within your lifetime.

Congratulations - that earned a real laugh from me.

Quote of the week, hands down, no contest.

Valid point, although this theory has a lot of degrees of freedom. One might argue that it would predict that Churchill would get a pass from the anti-fascist collective, given that the thing he's most famous for is helping to defeat the most prominent example of fascism in human history.

One might argue that it would predict that Churchill would get a pass from the anti-fascist collective, given that the thing he's most famous for is helping to defeat the most prominent example of fascism in human history.

Not if the argument is that Churchill was in charge of an only-slightly-less-fascist state, whose conflict with the greater was merely about Who Should Dominate.

Among quasi-Marxist (this is misleading because contemporary leftists almost uniformly haven't read Marx) people in the present they have already decided that the Soviet Union, near-alone, defeated Nazi Germany.

First things first: the tweet is just wrong on its face, unless you would have me believe that the people who protested against racially integrated schools in 1960s America were really in the right all along (hot take if so).

Good point. Not to mention the pro slavery mobs who used to riot and destroy the buildings and printing presses of anti-slavery newspapers. There were over 100 documented cases of this in the pre-Civil-War era in the United States [source].

By the way, the pro-slavery rioters were Democrats, and Democrat politicians and police often looked the other way as it happened. That pattern continued on straight from Andrew Jackson in the 1830's to Bull Connor in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's. Fast forward to today: some things have changed, and some have stayed the same. Black is the new white; BLM is the new KKK, and Democrats are the new... Democrats!

From reading Nixonland, he documents a bunch of right wing protestors doing the same thing left wing protestors did in the 1960's. We never really hear about it though. We only hear about left wing protestors vs police or the National Guard.

How many is a bunch, and what counts as the same thing? I'm curious to see a list of these and I challenge you to a game: you name a documented act of Republican act of mob violence (where most of the protesters presumably self-identified as republicans and at least one person was injured), and I will name two Democrat acts of mob violence, etc., back and forth for as long as you can come up with them. "A dollar a ball until the loser says quit" [The Hustler].

Apart from anti-Civil Rights political violence in the south, of which there was a lot (the rioters were right-wing, but would have been registered Democrats), the Hardhat riots are the most obvious example of right-wing political violence in the time period you are looking at. Over 100 people, including 7 cops, were hospitalised. Given the partisan politics of NYC construction unions, you can call it a Democratic riot on a technicality (the ringleaders were construction union officers who were registered Democrats, and they were protesting the decision of liberal Republican mayor James Lindsay to fly a flag at half-mast after the Kent State shootings), the rioters were condemned by national Democratic leaders and praised by the Nixon administration.

Opposition to forced bussing was mostly peaceful, but anti-bussing riots in Louisville in 1975 involved police cars being torched and widespread use of tear gas, so I assume there were multiple injuries. Again, given the partisan politics of the white South, the rioters were probably registered Democrats.

But my google-fu is telling me that

  • The vast majority of political violence in the US during this period was race-related.
  • After 1963 or so, the vast majority of the race-related violence is black urban riots.

You name the hardhat riots, in which 100 people were hospitalized and none killed.

I name

  1. the 1992 LA riots, in which 2383 people were injured and 63 people killed, and
  2. the 1965 Watts riots, which resulted in 34 deaths.

Your move.

Pity Hlynka isn't here, he'd have liked you.

We can only fight on in his name, because he was in fact right.

He was right about Democrats aRe the Real Racists; the problem with DR3 isn't that it's wrong but that it's useless. He was wrong about everyone on the right whose tactics or beliefs he disliked actually being a progressive leftist, even if he got a few right merely by coincidence.

He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle, that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement, and that their conflict with each other is fundamentally an example of the narcissism of small differences. To the extent that I understood his arguments, he also appeared to be correct about Hobbes vs Rosseau.

Even I who is fine with leaving the framework intact and only swapping demographical categories, a position which not many on the right share, would not call it a small difference whether the boot is on the faces of straight White men or worn on the feet. Maybe for some Rawlsian intelligence from beyond the mortal world it is.

He was right that the AuthLeft/AuthRight horseshoe is in fact a circle

I assume that you are here claiming that the AuthLeft and AuthRight are really "the same" in some sense, in line with your previous posts on the subject.

On what criteria are you making this judgement?

I don't believe that your previous criteria used to support variations on this thesis in the past have been successful. You claimed that progressives and white identitarians are not distinct because they have no relevant "differences in policy, action, or outcome" beyond "which specific racial groupings should be favored". I responded by citing multiple substantial policy disagreements between them that were unrelated to race. (Admittedly though, it's not clear to me if "progressives" and "white identitarians" are the same thing as the "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight", and the arguments I outlined in the old thread may not be relevant to this new thesis. Please correct me if I'm going astray.)

You later claimed that the far left and far right are actually the same because they both endorse the same core philosophical commitment, specifically the commitment to the idea that "we know how to solve all our problems", presumably using Enlightenment reason or something equivalent. But I argued that there are leftists (communists, even) who deny this axiom.

So, what is the current criteria you endorse? Did I go wrong in one of my earlier arguments?

that both are progeny of the Enlightenment/Progressive movement

Maybe. (I'm somewhat skeptical of the idea of the "Enlightenment" as a discrete identifiable event.) But even granting this, I don't think it changes much. Things can be derived from the same source and still be different. Humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but they're not "the same" in any meaningful sense.

I assume that you are here claiming that the AuthLeft and AuthRight are really "the same" in some sense, in line with your previous posts on the subject.

Yes, I am.

Admittedly though, it's not clear to me if "progressives" and "white identitarians" are the same thing as the "AuthLeft" and "AuthRight", and the arguments I outlined in the old thread may not be relevant to this new thesis. Please correct me if I'm going astray.

I consider White Identitarians are a subset of the Authoritarian Right. I'm pretty sure @BurdensomeCount isn't white, but I'm opposed to their ideological project for the same reasons I'm opposed to @WaltBismarck's ideological projects, past and present. While they are likely opposed to each other, the things that are similar between them are the things I find unacceptable. To me, they fit a single classification, because a single set of objections, a single set of values-incompatibilities, and a single set of necessary responses covers both of them. I've previously used the example of Luciano and Gambino soldiers, or Stalinists and Trotskyites, both of which are groups who obviously are "different" in many ways, but who from my perspective are classified identically as, respectively, "mafioso" and "communist".

I readily concede that other people with other values and other interests might care deeply about the distinctions I see as irrelevant, and might consider the similarities I consider paramount to be inconsequential. I can't speak for people who don't share my values, but my values are my values, and I think they are good ones, and generally more useful than the alternatives.

In any case, this is not a new thesis. It's exactly the same thesis I've argued in many previous discussions, though it's entirely possible I've communicated it poorly. Language is difficult, especially where others have not broken up the ground for you in advance, and I have a lot less time for in-depth conversation than I used to.

I responded by citing multiple substantial policy disagreements between them that were unrelated to race.

I found your citations unpersuasive, but didn't have time to get into it further and so figured it was best to let you have the last word until the next time the topic came around. I've still got both that thread and several of the linked articles up in my tab graveyard reading list.

You later claimed that the far left and far right are actually the same because they both endorse the same core philosophical commitment, specifically the commitment to the idea that "we know how to solve all our problems", presumably using Enlightenment reason or something equivalent.

I believe that "We know how to solve all our problems" is a brief, common-language encapsulation of the core thesis of a specific ideological movement, and that this ideological movement is best understood as the central example of the Enlightenment. Prior to the Enlightenment this movement did not exist, and post-Enlightenment this movement has been overwhelmingly dominant throughout subsequent history. I think this movement's axioms are both very wrong and very dangerous, and further believe that its dominance is rapidly approaching an end, for reasons directly related to how this movement was formed and how its ideology predetermines its tactics.

From that thread:

Isn't traditional Christianity quite opinionated on how we can solve all our problems? "For man's happiness consists essentially in his being united to the Uncreated Good, which is his last end."

Christianity's equivalent formulation would be "He will solve all our problems," with the understanding that the solution comes at the end of time and from an agency beyond ourselves. Compare the phrase "the poor you will always have with you" to the conceptual bundle represented by the declaration of a "war on poverty". One flatly states that the problem of Poverty is unsolvable under mortal conditions. The other assumes that the problem of Poverty can be defeated through coordinated human action, right now and under present conditions.

We, as in present humans and present human agency, no divine agency required or admitted, no delay to the unforeseeable future required or admitted.

Know How To, as in the knowledge we already have or can immediately gain is sufficient to our objectives. The Enlightenment does not claim that problems might be solvable with a few thousand years more of study, it always claims that the Revolution can begin immediately. If circumstances force an admission that solutions cannot be achieved immediately, then they are the fabled Ten Years Away, or at most a generation. This frequently resulted in solutions being Ten Years Away for a century or more, without apparent concern on the part of the Enlightened.

Solve, the objective. Not ameliorate, not reduce somewhat, but render to the past-tense in their entirety. Again, unfortunate realities can soften this rhetoric by introducing intermediate steps, but these steps are never presented or accepted as sufficient in themselves; the total, one might say final solution remains paramount.

All, as in not some, not most, but a fully universal claim.

Our Problems, again a universal claim. Everything humans consider a capital-P Problem. War, disease, poverty, hunger, crime, hatred, inequalilty, envy, fear, pain, even in some cases death. No problem is admitted to be insurmountable. Note that this does not preclude selective redefinition as "good, actually" (mass murder, mass torture and enslavement, assorted horrors committed against the outgroup), or simply ignoring something as not actually being a problem (human mortality), as is convinient.

This is the Enlightenment axiom. Progressives are called that because they believe that we are Progressing from a state of unsolved problems to a state of solved problems, and they believe this because they have adopted the axiom I have just described. The point of the Orwell passage in our previous discussion was to show how that perspective projects out into thought and language: the bedrock belief in our fundamental control over the world we find ourselves in. Prior to the conversation with Hlynka, I was thinking in terms of plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem. Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.

And the corollary to this axiom is likewise quite simple: "If a problem isn't getting solved, then it's because someone is in the way." and from that corollary, Progressivism's danger unfolds.

But I argued that there are leftists (communists, even) who deny this axiom.

Did you? From the thread:

Zizek has transitioned over the years towards a position where he treats Marxism as more of a regulative ideal to strive for, rather than a single defined end state. McGowan critiques the traditional Marxist conception of a utopian social order free of contradictions because it fails to account for the lessons of Freud and Lacan about the fundamentally self-destructive nature of the human psyche. He describes his position as one of "permanent revolution"...

I am not familiar with either Zizek or McGowen, but the description you provide explains why they don't buy into Marxian Utopianism, not why they aren't adhering to "We know how to solve all our problems." Advocating for "Permanent Revolution" certainly doesn't sound incompatible with the core axiom described above. Do they believe that our present society could be vastly improved through a proper re-ordering of society? Do they believe that poverty, mental illness, crime and so on are essentially ills that our society has chosen to inflict on the less fortunate? Do they believe we might choose otherwise?

But if they have in fact abandoned the core axiom, if in fact they don't believe in Progress toward a Brighter Future, then I'd say they've left the Enlightenment and are doing their own thing. I would also argue that they're no longer a central example of a Marxist, whatever they choose to call themselves. For a similar example, consider Scientology: to me, the most salient feature of Scientology is its hierarchical nature, designed explicitly to crush and control individual members. Scientology splinter groups that have broken from that hierarchy but continue to believe the lore and perform the basic rituals together still call themselves Scientologists, but I can continue to object to "Scientology" as a group while considering them irrelevant to the discussion. In the same way, I don't actually care if someone wants to call themselves a "Marxist"; it's a perennially-fashionable label, as appalling as that is. What I care about is whether they believe, as Marx and all the central examples of Marxists very evidently did, that "we know how to solve all our problems."

If a Marxist thinks like this, is he no longer a Marxist? Well, he obviously doesn't become a traditional Red.

They don't have to be a traditional Red to no longer be an Adherent to the Enlightenment; there are other things in the world. These two are especially relevant to me because I am a Red and believe Redness is correct about most questions, and because the Enlightenment is dominant. Absent an adherence to the Enlightenment axiom, though, why should I be concerned about a pair of bespoke academic theorists? What impact have they had on the actual world?

Do you think that white identitarians think they "know how to solve all our problems"?

It certainly seems so to me.

I intend to set up a thousand-year Reich and anyone who supports me in this battle is a fellow-fighter for a unique spiritual—I would say divine—creation...

In the Midwest I encountered a different kind of white person that honestly seemed quasi-Asian to me. They had no will to power. They were not Romans. They seemed more like the Chinese of the Ming era, or like modern Europeans. But there wasn’t a Faustian spirit to be found anywhere... ...My experiences taught me that these people want nothing to do with my vision for the world and aren’t my volk in any meaningful sense... ...They have no destiny except under the caligae.

Putting it all together it’s quite clear, both from the high level outside view, as well as the empirical evidence of where people choose to go if they are allowed to, that even though the rulers of a society may not be deontologically acting in particularly nice ways, and that there is a subgroup which is doing worse than they would otherwise be doing if the rulers would “just change their behavior” and allow them more say in how the place is run, the choice in reality is often not “nasty” rulers vs “nice” rulers, but rather “nasty” rulers vs even nastier alternative, and in that case the net change in sum total welfare of those “oppressed” by these rulers may well be more positive than every other plausible world, and so the “nasty” rulers are good for humanity as a whole and should be seen as such.

No one who thinks this way can ever be my ally, and I can never be on theirs. Distance great enough to ensure mutual ignorance is the best that can be hoped for.

Things can be derived from the same source and still be different. Humans and apes are descended from a common ancestor, but they're not "the same" in any meaningful sense.

True enough. In one sense, it's obvious that there is no objective measure of similarity and difference; Hitler was composed of different cells at any given minute of his life, after all, and both Hitler and Lincoln were adult human males. By "the same", as regards to ideologies, I mean that the features relevant to me are isomorphic, that identical analysis, objections, predictions and responses are generally applicable across the proposed set. That seems like a reasonable definition to me. I don't think my definition of the Enlightenment axiom is esoteric, and I think it has strong explanatory and predictive power, and is thus generally useful even for people who do not share my worldview. It's possible that I'm wrong, but I don't think so.

That's all I have time for. Considerably more than I had time for, actually. I'll have to leave it here.

Hlynka reminded me that there is no solution, that there is no plan, that we are not in control of the world; all we control is ourselves; we make our choices and live with the consequences.

I'm in complete agreement on this point!

Anyway, I think one of the crucial issues is that, as I raised at the end of the previous thread, "we know how to solve all our problems" isn't a good criteria for partitioning equivalence classes of political ideologies. As an epistemic attitude, it can be mixed and matched with multiple different ideologies.

Suppose we have three different people:

  • #1 is a Marxist who thinks we know how to solve all our problems. He unabashedly thinks that the proletarian revolution will usher in a utopia.

  • #2 is a standard American libertarian who also thinks we know how to solve all our problems. Say the story is something like, free market democratic capitalism is the only ideology that will engender the type of scientific research and economic growth we need to develop ASI. And once we have ASI we'll have a utopia.

  • #3 is a standard American libertarian who is virtually identical to #2 on all substantive policy issues, except that he doesn't think we know how to solve all our problems. He doesn't think libertarianism will lead to a utopia, but he believes in it and advocates for it anyway, even though he acknowledges that the ultimate outcome of all our political actions is always uncertain.

So, who is identical with who? And who's the odd man out here?

Based on the importance you assign to the criteria of "knowing how to solve all our problems", it seems like you'd be forced to say that #1 and #2 are the same, and #3 is different. But this just seems wrong. The more natural classification is that the two libertarians are the same (and indeed, getting hung up on whether libertarianism can lead to a utopia or not would be a narcissism of small differences), and the Marxist is different.

I'm also skeptical that, if given the choice between living in a Stalinist regime ruled by #1, or a somewhat more libertarian version of 2024 America with #2 as the four year duly elected president, you would say "it doesn't matter to me, they both think we know how to solve all our problems, so I have no preference for one country over the other".

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Almost everything we think and do in the modern world has at least some of its roots in the Enlightenment.

A lot of what we think and do has some of its roots in the Enlightenment. There are notable exceptions, a lot of those exceptions cluster in thought-space, and they form the foundation of Red Tribe.

The United States itself is a product of the Enlightenment (founded by Enlightenment thinkers etc.) and he was a super patriotic Red Tribe American.

America (together with Britian and their progeny) appears to me to be a clear outlier in the range of Enlightenment societies, throughout the entire history of the Enlightenment from its founding till now. It is nonetheless true that America has much of its roots in the Enlightenment, though, and I would argue that is why America is doomed. We didn't get enough of the Enlightenment to wreck us on the spot, but we got more than enough for the social equivalent of cancer, which we are now dying of.

Taking his arguments seriously we could also accuse him of all kinds of things that he would disagree with and doesn't believe in because of tenuous links.

In the first place, he is not here to defend himself, so it seems rather unsporting. But I am here, I am better at maintaining decorum than he was, and I'm willing to defend most of his arguments or make similar ones of my own. If you think taking my arguments seriously leads to absurd results, feel free to elaborate.

You're here, and I really wish you weren't. The way you are now, compared to 2020 adds immensely to my feeling that I should kill myself before it's too late.

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I don’t believe you can draw a line from Jim Crow defenders and lynch mobs to whatever’s popular today. Even your caricature of it.

My claim of fact is that the Democratic party has, since its inception with Andrew Jackson, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, through the civil rights era, and up to this very day, tended to be the party of (1) racial caste systems, (2) illegal mob violence, (3) censorship, and (4) you-work-I-eat, from slavery to welfare.

The 1960's example is a bad example because many of those Democrats switched to being Republicans such as Strom Thurmond after the Democrats started pushing Civil Rights legislation.

"Many" is how many? I am skeptical of this claim of fact. I would like to see a list of pols in the US House and Senate who (a) voted against the civil rights acts of the 1960's, and who (b) ever (before or after) switched parties from Democrat to Republican. Is there more than one (Strom Thurmond)? Robert Byrd, champion of segregation who filibustered the 1964 civil rights act, was a lifelong Democrat who was praised by Hilary Clinton as a "Friend and mentor", and Barak Obama gave the eulogy at his funeral.

And what makes you say it was Democrats who pushed Civil Rights Legislation more than Republicans? For example, looking at the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 39% of House Republicans voted nay, but only 20% of Republicans, while in the Senate 31% of Democrats voted nay but only 18% of Republicans. I think the story was the same for other similar bills. Am I mistaken?

It’s an old idea at this point that “woke” is a new religion, but my pet expansion of this is that “the weight of history” has replaced the concepts of judgment day and the afterlife.

I was just discussing this the other day with someone actually. I wished at the time that we had a better education of unsuccessful progressive movements as well as successful. The operative question ought to be “how could you tell at the time” but to even countenance that it could have been confusing is unacceptable.

That’s what we face though, living through history. It’s been stunning to see how many are willing to abdicate thinking it through in favor of listening to prophets claiming to know how they’ll be judged long after they’re dead.

My question for people is how they would have known to be for civil rights but against lobotomies.

I was just discussing this the other day with someone actually. I wished at the time that we had a better education of unsuccessful progressive movements as well as successful. The operative question ought to be “how could you tell at the time” but to even countenance that it could have been confusing is unacceptable.

In all truth, I don't think anyone can. I think we (collectively) try lots of different things and eventually the truth falls out of it.

I think sometimes the learned behavior of trying to make arguments that make outgroup look dumb overrides your attempts to actually understand the world around you. This is one of those cases. Historically religious people actually believe in their religions, as physical facts about reality, as much as they do anything else. People have mental breakdowns about heaven and hell! Whereas being on the 'right side of history' is, in its entirety, a rhetorical device to refer to social pressures or empathy for oppressed people who exist today. Nobody who says that is actually imagining dozens of people looking back on them from a century after and being disappointed. They are not at all comparable.

If you want to disagree that’s fine, but I’ve spent considerable time as a religious person and surrounded by the type of people I’m describing, and I think the weight of judgment day is comparable to the weight of “right side of history.” It’s not a boo outgroup statement by any stretch; I think it ties into the thesis that we tore down religion with little to replace it, so people are cribbing together ways to meet their needs.

Hmmm I spend time around both, more around wokes / progressives and I really don't see it.

When I think about the thoughts that motivate someone who leans progressive, I think things like George Floyd, the idea of someone not being able to pay off medical debt and foregoing care as a result, black kids who can't get good jobs because of racism, imagining a kid who died in a school shooting because we don't have gun control, someone who's mocked for being gay, etc. And also the strong social taboos, and internally confusing the social taboo with justifiably taking offense at words that harm people. I'm having trouble of thinking of an interaction where it felt like people were really, genuinely, afraid that history would judge them. They feel much more afraid that their current social group will judge them.

The reason being, historical revisionism is woke people’s favourite pastime.

Should be noted this isn't just a woke pasttime. Every culture warrior enjoys attacking the other side's guys. Sometimes (many times) same figures will get flack from the both sides. I've read countless right-wing articles and posts about how FDR was a commie symphatizer or JFK and LBJ and MLK were cheaters or (getting into Christian conservatives) how Darwin and Margaret Sanger were racists or (getting to more commie side of things) how Marx was personally filthy or Lenin continously said and did psycho things. I mean, I had thought of using the almost obsessive focus on Che Guevara, a figure more for the past generations (I have seen many more "revisions" of Che's history online than actual Che shirts) as an example, but you did it yourself! And during the War on Terror, of course, talking about it online, one couldn't avoid hearing about Mohammed and Aisha. One gets the idea.

Of course the conservatives would not think in the terms of progress and a "right side of history" as much, the point here is tearing down the other side's totemic figures with a gusto is a fairly natural part of the culture war.

Everyone tears down the other team's idols. What sets wokeness apart from other ideologies is that they apply this approach to everyone. Freddie deBoer said one of the defining aspects of social justice politics is the belief that "almost everyone you encounter in contemporary society is a bad person". Credit where credit is due, that blog "your fave is problematic" is relentless: in no way do celebrities get a pass from them merely by having the appropriate skin tone or mouthing the right shibboleths. When hardcore woke people say "everything is problematic", they mean it.

how Darwin and Margaret Sanger were racists

I'd look at those separately as they're just lame-ass attempts at the DR3 narrative.

I don't think they were, in the context of the great 90s/00s creationism/evolution online wars. The race/ethnicity culture war was at a low ebb and a lot of creationist types talking about this subject probably genuinely conceived themselves as, at least, non-racists if not anti-racists.

I can also imagine they genuinely believed they finally found a message that resonates with black churchgoers.

Agreed - the story here is that Christian right has, consistently with the broader "pro-life" memeplex, always been sincere in their opposition to eugenics, and the links between Darwin and Margaret Sanger (and the early C20 Progressive memeplex more broadly) and support for eugenics are absolutely real - in the modern world where "eugenics bad" is near-universally accepted, this creates an open goal for the religious right which they are happy to kick the ball through at every opportunity.

There are not many cases where the religious right was on the right side of history by the woke left's own standards in living memory, but this is legitimately one of them.

It's worth pointing out though that I can imagine many mainstream Republicans (not those heavily involved in the Christian Right) would also be more or less sympathetic to Sanger's ideas if they actually checked out what those were.

What is "the DR3 narrative"? All I find on a quick Google is references to an anime I'm not familiar with.

EDIT: I think I've figured it out... "Democrats 'R' the Real Racists"?

Yes.

I’ve always found the “history” argument weak. The reason people protest is at least ostensibly because there’s a moral wrong being committed. Yet, the “right side of history” argument doesn’t even engage with the moral arguments. If the cause is morally right, then it is right, whether or not history goes along with it. Second, history isn’t even a line, it’s a graph it can and has changed direction multiple times. The Romans were okay with being gay, until they became Catholic. Several countries have gone from being communist to being market liberals at the same time other states have gone the other way.

I think at the core it's surprisingly a variation of "might makes right", but updated for a modern audience. It vaguely sounds moralistic at first glance, but it can also be used as a simple "your objections don't matter, you will die and we will prevail". It's also an important part of the progressive message as a counter to the natalist objection: Progressive ideologies generally have terrible TFR, and as such are liable to simply be replaced. So they adopted a self-conception as a vanguard that lives on in the ideals of the future society, even if they may not have biological offspring.

"We will bury you", indeed...

(If you really want a laugh, turn this technique back on them. Next time you see some twentysomething university student reeking of weed wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, point out to him that the man in question once asserted “The negro is indolent and lazy, and spends his money on frivolities”.)

It's not only that. It's much more telling that, in fact, every single political endeavor Guevara engaged in on his own initiative was an utter failure with idiotic planning: 1. his ministerial role in Cuba 2. the war in the Congo 3. the war in Bolivia. It's almost comical when you really think about it. Among all the prominent political figures of the 20th Century, he was the biggest loser. Mussolini and Hitler don't even compare.

I don't think the average woke person or leftist would be that put off learning that Che Guevara was an incompetent loser. But learning that he said something (GASP!) racist...

Ironically, I first understood his take the other way around [erroneously]. That protests today are wrong with regard to the modern state of the world, but are right if we imagine them happening half a century ago with the same slogans. BLM was atrocious and unjustified, but in the 1970, there was a kind of solid argument about remnants of institutional racism. Likewise for feminism and other fashionable causes. Were there protests against Israel in 1973-74? Maybe some organized by the PLO, I'm not sure. But Hamas had not even been founded yet.

Were there protests against Israel in 1973-74?

Oh yeah. The backstory had a similar "fuck around and find out" pattern, right down to a sneak attack on the same Jewish holiday, though a priori you'd have thought the Egypt / Syria / Saudi / Algerian / Jordanian / Iraqi / Libyan / Kuwaiti / Tunisian / Moroccan (plus a handful of Cuban troops and North Korean pilots!) coalition had a much better chance than Hamas did of accomplishing something more than just psychological warfare. The protest actions afterward were also much more directly impactful.

My theory is that the "right side of history" narrative (and its close cousins, casting being progressive as just being a "decent human being" and denigrating opposition as "retrograde" or "reactionary") is so ubiquitous because the progressive left is deeply confused about whether it believes in moral realism, and so adopts an inconsistent (but very effective) posture on moral questions.

On these big social questions, there are, at root, three reasons for acting:

  1. You are a moral realist and believe that X is right/wrong as a fundamental fact about reality. (How do you know? Maybe you believe God -- who knows such things -- said so; maybe you believe you have a direct apprehension of the truth; maybe it is a logical consequence of other things that are in the first two categories.) You act because you think it is right, period.
  2. You have a preference that you want to fulfill, and think that you and those who share it have the power -- or can obtain the power -- to enforce it. You act out of pure preference and power.
  3. You just want to go along to get along. You don't have an independent reason to act, so you don't act independently -- maybe you stay out of it, or maybe you join a cause you think will imminently win (or is most of your social circle) so that people will like you.

"The right side of history" tries to have it all three ways while not committing enough to any of them to expose weakness there.

Straightforward moral realism is a problem for the progressive left (at least in its modern incarnation; past movements vary) for two reasons. First, because most of its thought leaders are not moral realists, and many of the rest would reject moral realism if the question were put to them (though they may implicitly act as if they believed in it). Second, because the natural response to "It is a moral law of the universe that [insert progressive cause here] is good" is to say: "And how do you know? I'm pretty sure I've always heard that God said the opposite, my intuitions disagree, and anyway you just got done telling me that you don't believe in hearing from God, so why should I believe you?"

Straightforward appeals to power or preference are not persuasive -- at least not unless you already have the power and just want to compel, not "win hearts and minds".

And finally, appealing to people's "go along to get along" instincts is tough unless you can offer social proof that either your cause already dominates, or soon will. (It works wonders when you can, though -- see what happened to gay marriage.)

Enter "the right side of history". It appeals to moral realist intuitions and persuasive force, while not actually committing anyone to staking out an actual claim about ground truth morality. It can be a threat based on present or claimed future power without being explicit about it. It appeals to "go along to get along" without having to actually produce the goods in terms of current social influence.

Time will tell (ha) about whether the rhetorical strategy will continue to be effective, but I expect that, absent major ideological realignment, it will continue to be used in one form or another.

This is an extremely accurate description of the phenomenon, and it's prevalent here as well, contributing to Hlynka's observation that a surprising number of the commenters here have built their positions on the same fundamental ground as the progressive left, though they want to vehemently deny it, as well as my observation that this turn to stealth moral relativism packaged in confusion came, in large part, due to New Internet Atheism convincing a lot of folks to at least claim a jettison of moral realism, but not knowing how to handle it philosophically, and leading pretty directly into the dominant frame being one of pure power politics along the lines of cancel/deplatform/shame woke-style culture.

So far, when I've prodded, I've seen one commenter embrace the conclusion in a clear-eyed manner, but more often, folks just lean in to the mire of completely confused meta-ethics. After seeing your excellent trilemma, it makes sense that it seems common to appeal to game theory, even if it's still a confused appeal, because I'm starting to think that the appeal to game theory is basically a variant of "the right side of history". One doesn't need to do any of the hard work of showing why an iterative game theoretic process will actually converge to the "right" solution (because one cannot commit to positing a "right" solution), but you can see in those threads that they are utterly allergic to embracing a straightforward appeal to power or preference. So we get weaksauce meta-ethics that make it obvious to any real, existing agents who actually understand game theory and can think through the process of unilateral defection (perhaps at the level of a movement/group of 'insiders') and realize that no one is able to present a meaningful argument against pure exertion of cultural power, so the obvious game theoretic response is to do precisely that. It's like they sort of realize that they're playing something akin to prisoner's dilemma, but weirdly think that invoking "the right side of history" or vague "game theoretic concerns" will certainly result in cooperate-cooperate, but simultaneously not understanding game theory enough to know that it actually leads to "the wrong side of history", defection, and pure power.

What the “right side of history” promises is that, if you join our team, historians will write hagiographies about us and forgive all of our worst sins. And if you don’t join our team? We’ll have no choice but to smear your team as depraved monsters with no redeeming features to speak of.

Props to @NelsonRushton for demonstrating why this is, as the kids say, non-unique. If you don’t join the right team, future generations will insist you’re “the new KKK”. But put the right letter in front of your name and they’ll whitewash you.

Yeah, it’s good rhetorical strategy. Pushes the right tribal buttons. A pure expression of ingroup power. That also makes it truth-agnostic, which is why it’s against our rules. I don’t think it’s surprising that actual politics doesn’t care.

Props to @NelsonRushton for demonstrating why this is, as the kids say, non-unique.

Where?

I honestly am not sure myself, but I guess he is referring to this post.

Nelson has the right link.

Is that not an example of smearing the enemy team for their side of history?

Ah, of course. I should have just scrolled down.

Seems to me like a lot of the current protests are taking the masks off and are just pro-intifada, pro-10/7, more voicefull in knowing he meaning “of the river from the sea”

I wrote off a lot of the initial protests and just dumb teens and college kids that did not understand the meaning of the words they used. They are increasingly now just suddenly like terrorists anti-semites to me.

Partly I like it. Seems like they f’d around and found out with the ideologies so many in their community promoted. But it does seem bad.

I think there should be consequences for everyone who tried to say "nobody supports Hamas!"

They were wrong or they were lying. They shouldn't get to pretend they never said it.

I wonder if it might be worth nuancing 'pro-Intifada', 'pro-Hamas', and so on?

It seems to me that many of these protests are, yes, genuinely opposed to the existence of the state of Israel, and supportive of 'decolonisation' interpreted to mean 'Israel should not exist and all Israeli Jews should leave and find homes in other countries, and if they refuse, they are legitimately the targets of lethal violence'. But the rhetoric and justification given for this is so radically different to the rhetoric and justification of either Hamas or any on-the-ground Palestinian resistance movements that I think the gulf is worthy of recognition. For the American campus protester, what Hamas or Palestinians actually want is close to irrelevant - their politics are not so much pro-Intifada or pro-Hamas they are anti-coloniser. Israel is a 'coloniser', which makes them the bad guys, which makes the opposite of Israel the good guys.

If nothing else, the campus protest ideology is not the ideology of the Hamas charter, or even the revised one. I don't think the protesters are reading that charter and unironically agreeing with it. (Though I grant that the revised, 2017 version seems calculated to appeal more to liberal Westerners.) Almost none of them are Muslims, for a start. It's something different, and must have its own origins and influences.

Presumably the far-left groups that have (along with diaspora groups) generally been mainly responsible for keeping the organized militant pro-Palestine movement going would feel most affinity towards groups like PFLP.

That's interesting, I was thinking of this slightly differently. Everyone talks about the hippie protests of the 60s as this big purposeful, meaningful thing that changed American culture for the better and were protesting a meaningless war, etc. This whole Columbia thing has gotten me to reconsider how much the hippie protests actually had a point from the get-go. Did they also start out, and maybe even stay, as a bunch of petulant teens complaining without having much of an agenda, or list of demands, or purpose? Did we ascribe the meaning and purpose to these protests after the fact, at least in some cases?


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