Part 8: Our Inherited Society

Reason and Utopia

Reason is best understood as a personality, not a faculty, with aims and weaknesses. It falls in love with itself, and worse: with its own creations, elevating and worshiping them as absolutes. Its greatest temptation is to claim that nothing transcendent or outside its creation need exist.

→ This is the meaning of totalitarian: everything that needs to be discovered has been discovered. Everything will unfold precisely as planned. All problems will vanish, forever, once the perfect system is accepted. Marxism has always attracted intellectual utopians, whose faith in their own intellect assured them that they were always right.

→ Today’s utopia: society must be altered (“bias eliminated”) until all outcomes are equitable, and every impediment is but “social construct.” But equality of outcome, not opportunity, can’t work: inputs and outputs cannot be quantified. Every person is unique - and not just in a trivial manner: importantly, significantly, meaningfully unique. Group membership cannot capture that.

Cultural Restructuring can’t solve everything

→ Hunter-gatherers were far more murderous than their urban, industrialized counterparts, despite their communal lives and localized cultures. Complex social structures often serve to reduce, not exacerbate, the violent tendencies of human beings. It’s not just wrong to attribute all violent tendencies to the pathologies of social structure - it’s backwards.

→ Cultural restructuring can’t solve all individual problems. We evolved complex societies over millennia, but don’t yet fully understand why what we are doing works. Use caution with social revolution, because revolutions are destabilizing and dangerous.

The world is more than power, or money

Power plays into human motivation, but that doesn't mean that it plays the only or primary role. Some believe that only power exists, so the use of power is fully justifiable. It is the same irony in the fact that socialism is more capitalist than capitalism, because it believes just as strongly in money: if different people had the money, humanity’s problems would go away. But that is simply untrue - many problems can’t be solved by money, others are even exacerbated by it.

→ There is little evidence that all hierarchies are based on power and aimed at exclusion. Hierarchies based on power collapse - those based on competence don’t.

→ Orwell concluded that the armchair-philosophizing, victim-identifying, pity-and-contempt- dispensing social-reformer types frequently did not like the poor, as they claimed. Instead, they just hated the rich. Their resentment/jealousy hid under piety/sanctimony/self-righteousness.

Responding to criticism of patriarchy

Culture is not the creation of men, and history is not a long story of men as the prime source of the oppression of women. Consider this version of history: throughout history, men and women both struggled terribly for freedom from the overwhelming horrors of privation and necessity. Women were often at a disadvantage, as they had all the vulnerabilities of men, with the extra reproductive burden, and less physical strength, not to mention the serious practical inconvenience of menstruation, the high probability of unwanted pregnancy, the chance of death or damage during childbirth, and the burden of too many young children.

→ Maybe the so-called oppression of the patriarchy was instead an imperfect collective attempt by men and women, over millennia, to free each other from privation, disease and drudgery.

→ An alternative narrative on the wage gap: why do we consider career as more important than love and family? Or believe that fully sacrificing for success in one dimension is desirable at all? High-powered male lawyers outnumber female ones, not because of sexism, but because the women who leave want a job - and a life - that allows them some time for other interests.

Men and women are not the same

Boys’ interests tilt towards things; girls’ interests tilt towards people. Boys are more disobedient (negatively) or more independent (positively) than girls, and they suffer for this during pre-university education. After both sexes hit puberty, boys are less agreeable and less susceptible to anxiety and depression. These differences are most pronounced in Scandinavian societies where gender-equality has been pushed hardest. Gender is not a social construct.

→ From an evolutionary standpoint, a woman should not look after a man, because she must look after children, and a man should not be a child. So men have little patience for dependent men, and awake and conscious women want an awake and conscious partner (though wicked women may produce, support, and marry dependent men).

Responding to society as oppressive

Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The winners are more likely to justify the hierarchy, and the losers to criticize it. But the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces some hierarchy, and the pursuit of goals gives life meaning. So culture is oppressive - and everything we inherit requires constant repair - but it is wrong to view culture as only oppressive.

→ The West has been gifted highly functional infrastructure by our ancestors: comparatively uncorrupt political and economic systems, luxury, lifespan, freedom. We should be grateful for a complex, sophisticated culture that allows for many games, and thus many kinds of winners.

Vice is the default

Consider this: failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits, and bide your time. Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their degeneration. And then comes the flood.

→ Success: that’s the mystery. Virtue: that’s what’s inexplicable.

It is a similar thing with anxiety, taking drugs, peace, depression, laziness, and criminality. That people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together - this is miraculous. We must balance hatred for self and mankind with gratefulness for tradition and the state and astonishment at what normal everyday people accomplish.