patburgess

In order to answer the question of why so many on the right played along with rules and norms which guaranteed they would lose, the first step is to ask why anyone would do so, and the answer to that is quite simple: as odd as it sounds, there are benefits to losing, and some people get so caught up with them that they prefer to lose. In order to discuss why, it's worth taking a look at another of the hot button social issues that dominated society during the Post-War Era: the treatment of the developmentally disabled and mentally ill. The treatment of these groups in the 1950 and 1960s left a lot to be desired, and has been critiqued quite extensively. The mistreatment of the inmates in hospitals was dramatized in the novel and film One Flew Over the Cuckoo Nest, and for any reader who wishes to defend them I'd encourage reading the novel. Those institutions were horrific at best, and quite often descended to conditions which can only be described as evil.

With this said, the debates in the 1960s and 1970s over the institutions were stereotyped in such a way as to guarantee the left would win, as most of the debates in our society have been since the end of the Second World War: the left would point out the horrific nature of the institutions, and the right would respond with noting that many of these people would be unable to care for themselves without help. The result of releasing them would be a massive increase in people self medicating using drugs and alcohol; a massive spike in homeless populations, and a sever strain on social services, which would need to cope with a large number of people who are not able to handle the basics needed to function.

Given that confining people in institutions which make prisons make humane without due process for indeterminate periods of time because they are unable to care for themselves is a terrible policy, one which is deeply immoral by any measure, by allowing the debate to be framed that way the right ensured defeat. Reforming the systems would have benefited an enormous number of lives, and I tend to find the defences of the system profoundly disturbing to read, but they served a necessary purpose.

Some of it of course relates to the fact that those who work within the Cathedral and enjoy the perks it provides have to play by its rules, but some of it comes from the fact that those on the right who raised their concerns got an enormous amount of validation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the institutions which had until then confined the mentally ill were suddenly reformed and lost the ability to forcibly confine people. A large number of the people released were, in fact, unable to hold jobs because of severe mental illness; many of them turned to drugs as a way for self-medication; and social services across North America and Europe struggled as they suddenly had a huge influx of new people needing support, many of whom were unwilling to take it. Simply put, the right was proven to be right about the drawbacks of the policy.

I'm sure most of my readers know someone who takes immense pleasure out of being able to utter the words “I told you so” to someone else, to be vindicated by the results of something. This is one of the two main ways I see that the right benefited from losing: as long as the left can implement their policies, the right can continually point out that they correctly identified at least some of the outcomes would be negative. Notice however that the “I told you so!” factor requires losing: had the right been able to stop the release of the inmates of the mental hospitals, they would never have been vindicated.

This is a major issue, and one which means that the people drawn to the right by the ability to say “I told you so!” don't want to win: at a subconscious level, if the motivation is to be able to say that you knew from the beginning that something was a bad idea, it's much more satisfying to be able to do so when it's being implemented and having the exact outcomes predicted than if it's never tried at all and it all remains theoretical. What this means then, is that for those who were politically active and wanted to be able to say “I told you so!” becoming a right winger was a viable option, and it was all the more lucrative to the extent that the right could be guaranteed to lose. Given just how many people enjoy this particular past time, there was no shortage of people eager and willing to play their part.

There is at least one other major benefit to knowing you will lose that shaped the right, and this is the simple fact that if you win, then you must be prepared for the consequences, and in the 20th Century there was a very strong reminder of just how horrific this could be that most right wingers in the Western World could not avoid knowing something about: the Soviet Union, and Marxism.

Simply put, Karl Marx managed the remarkable feat of being right about the problems faced by 19th century society but being very, very wrong about the solutions. Karl Marx did not invent socialism: that honour goes to Charles Fourier in the early 1800s. Karl Marx' accomplishment can be summed up as taking Fourier's less giddy ideas, ditching things like the claim socialism would lead to the oceans turning into lemonade, and updating the critique of society for the mid to late 19th century.

Fourierism failed before Marxism was even invented, and indeed every attempt to implement socialism has failed, because it does not take human nature into account. Human beings are greedy, power hungry, and a large fraction of us behave poorly at the best of times. The reality is that any ideal world that people could create will fail for the simple reason that human beings are a strange mix, neither angel nor ape, but a mix of both. Marx, like many idealists, created a system which could only work with angels, and not human beings.

Attempts to implement Marxism thus slammed face first into the reality that they were unworkable in any world without lemonade oceans, and the illusion that it was being implemented could only be sustained by means of secret police, mass censorship, and gulags. For nearly everyone in the period from 1945, this was well known, and a large number of intellectuals likely had Marx in the back of their minds: “If my ideas are implemented, how high would the body count be?”

With the risk of becoming the next Karl Marx at the back of their mind, a good many intellectuals wigged out in various ways, for the simple reason that if a modest German intellectual forced into exile could end up with his ideas shaping governments around the world, then the possibilities that a single thinker could shape the world was immense. Given how destructive an influence Marxism was, a good many of the people who considered the possibility of becoming the next Karl Marx would have been justified in doing everything in their power to avoid it. The problem, however, is that anyone whose ideas are ever implemented runs the risk of their ideas being a colossal failure. Granted, it's usually on a smaller scale than Marx, but it's always the case: human beings can always be wrong.

There are two ways out of this trap: the first is to give up on thinking about anything with any kind of relevance. As the 20th century progressed, however, and government bureaucracies asserted ever increasing ability and authority to micromanage their citizens' and residents' lives, the option of finding something to write about with zero political relevance became ever more challenging; and meanwhile, if you have an intellectual disposition, it can be hard to avoid thinking about the problems faced by society. This is especially true of a society in crisis, which describes the entire era from 1914 to today.

The crisis was not a short term affair, like a war which lasts a few years and then is over, but rather a long drawn out malaise, one which lacked clear solutions and seemed quite intractable. In such an environment, with long drawn out problems and ongoing social, cultural, and political chaos and turmoil, trying to find a solution, any solution, becomes very appealing.

Here, however, things become worse, because not just did any intellectual who came up with a solution run the risk of becoming the next Karl Marx, but they also ran the risk of the ideas failing, and this drove a curious phenomena. There's an idea in psychology called provisional living: the idea is that people will park their fantasies of a better world in the notion things will get better after something else happens: filing for divorce, losing ten pounds, quitting smoking, or the like. As long as the thing in question does not and cannot happen, these fantasies can be completely detached from reality, but if the event in question becomes possible, then the fantasy meets reality and most of the time reality will not measure up.

A large fraction of the right then decided to engage in provisional living, pretending that if only their policies were implemented then society could be perfect. Initially, given that the earliest days of this occurred in a preexisting political framework, the right could insist that this was the case, as many of their ideas at the time were novel, and untested.

As time passed and the right became increasingly focused on the past, the realities of the fact that their preferred policies did not bring utopia when implemented began to cause cognitive dissonance. The response, by and large, has been to fixate on a particular moment, and portray it in the most positive ways possible, erasing the realities of history.

This decade is usually the 1950s, and the irony of the fact that most right wingers today would be so far to the left as to be radicals is not lost on me. There's a deeper irony here, however, one which is that the 1950s that the right likes to imagine is not at all the real one. The 1950s as imagined by the right makes no room for Jack Kerouac, or the Beatniks. The reality of the 1950s was that it was not the conformist, stable, quiet era that the current right likes to present, but just another decade.

The 1950s were not utopia. There are a good many things which make the decade preferable to the present; equally there are a good many ways in which the present is preferable to the 1950s. The reality of the matter however is that the true 1950s were quite a lot more dynamic and interesting than the story the right says about them. The Beatniks, for example, were proto-hippies, a class of figures which are all to often erased from discussion these days. What makes this all the more interesting is that they are being denigrated just as much by their intellectual heirs in the counter culture. We'll talk about that next week.

Last week's post here looked at the role of the dream of transcending human nature and how it plays a major role in the cultural left. I used the example of the Sexual Revolution, in large part because it exemplifies what I want to talk about much more clearly than most of the other examples. The reasons why will become clear over the next few weeks, but for now, I want to note that the Sexual Revolution as it took shape in the 1960s exemplifies the core claim of the Myth of Progress, the world view which has dominated our society since 1945.

This week, however, my point is best made by looking at a subset of the Sexual Revolution, namely the rights for the gay community. I will freely admit here that despite viewing many of the other consequences of the Sexual Revolution with distaste at best, I view gay marriage as perfectly acceptable, and indeed I think that it marks a massive improvement for those who happen to have said sexual orientation; and furthermore that denying it was a major injustice. To most people in 1950, this would have been very, very radical stuff indeed; the debates in those days were not on whether homosexuals should be allowed to get married, but rather over whether or not the laws against homosexuality were tough enough.

There is an obvious problem here, however, which is that while there are various reasons to oppose homosexuality, most of these rely on things which American society does not take very seriously. While there are traditional Christians who oppose it on religious grounds, the main argument made for why homosexual conduct is improper has typically been that sex is inherently about reproduction, and that therefore it was improper for two people of the same gender to engage in sex.

Every human society is a mess of contradictions and absurdities, but sometimes these contradictions become too much to cope with. This, without too much exaggeration, is what happened starting out in the late 1950s. As the feminist movement got going, and especially once the Sexual Revolution got going in full swing, the realities of the disconnect between sex between men and women being acceptable even when every precaution was being taken to avoid having a child and the argument that gay sex was inappropriate because it could not lead to children began to sink in.

At this point, only the extreme radicals saw the logical conclusion here, the state of affairs the American government currently embraces, with full equality between straight and gay couples in terms of marriage and adoption. In the 1960s, most of the activists merely sought to get laws making gay sex a crime removed from the books. There's two very good reasons for this: the first is that most people were unwilling to imagine accepting gay marriage, or gay couples raising children. The second reason behind this choice of strategy is a rather subtle one, which is that this was a necessary first step.

This is of course quite true, but it immediately raises an important question: what would guarantee that this would not be both the first and last step? When Illinois legalized gay sex in 1962, what was it that guaranteed that a little over forty years later this step would be applied to the entire country, or that less than fifteen years after that gay marriage would be legalized across the country?

The answer to that, if someone asked it, would usually be some variant of “Progress.” As Martin Luther King Jr put it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”. This sentiment strikes me as patently absurd, but it is the dominant ideal of the left: if it is unjust, then sooner or later the universe will address it. This gradual righting of wrongs is called “Progress”, and it will address all problems sooner or later.

Progress need not, and indeed usually does not, come in a single step. The archetypal example is that slavery was abolished in 1865, but it wasn't until more than a century later that the Civil Rights Movement began to address the remaining injustices of the Jim Crow Laws. There's a major problem with using this story as one to exemplify the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice however: the moral arc appears to flip flop. The rights for the freed slaves were quite good in 1865, and remained so until the 1870s. In 1870, Mississippi sent a black senator to the US Congress; in 1875, the state sent a second.

Jim Crow Laws were passed beginning in the 1870s, but it was not until the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 that racial segregation was firmly established. In other words, there was a period of time in the late 19th century in which the former slaves were treated better than they would be for a long time. Or, to go even further back, the laws which existed before the American Civil War restricting non-whites from voting were only enacted in the 1820s; prior to that free blacks who met the property requirements could, and did, vote.

Or, returning to the example of the gay community, as George Chauncey discusses in his masterpiece Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940, the gay community was thriving in the late 19th and early 20th century America, and it was only in the social upheavals of the 1930s that the gay community was forced underground. Simply put, the gay community of 1920 was in better shape and position than its equivalent in 1970.

This makes any kind of claim that Progress is inevitable clearly false, as any gains can, and have, been lost. Since this happens repeatedly, I think it's easier to argue that history does not have an inherent direction than that it does, and that it leads to anything which anyone in it can see in advance. However, on a good many social measures American society has slowly shifted leftward for the past seventy five years (at least), with ideas which were once radical becoming acceptable on the left, then moving into dominance, and then gradually becoming right wing and even reactionary as the left embraces ideas further left. These days, many on the left debate to what extent people who happen to be gay deserve extra legal protection, and it is fast becoming a right wing view to argue that gay marriages are no different from any other, and so gay couples and marriages deserve no further legal protections than straight ones. Seventy-five years ago that position would place someone far in the left, and the right wing position was that gay people ought to be locked in jail or even executed.

This kind of change is quite dramatic, and also interesting in many ways. The transformation of American society's views on the question of gay rights has been slow and gradual by human standards, but by historical terms it has been stunningly rapid. Additionally, while there were tragedies such as the Stonewall Riots, there were no real setbacks. At no point did American society ever reverse course for any length of time. This has been true of many of the changes which have occurred over the past seventy five years, it is a rather strange point, given how pervasive the changes have been, and how often social changes have stopped out or even reversed course before.

There's a very good explanation behind this peculiarity, one which can be found in Curtis Yarvin's work. Yarvin will be referenced a good many times in these essays, and in many ways he's the right's version of Karl Marx: just as Marx did an excellent job of highlighting the real flaws in his society and then presented the most incredible absurdities as a solution to the ills, so too has Yarvin done a very, very good job of highlighting many of the flaws in our society, and come up with solutions which I hope to every god in existence are never attempted.

Although his answer to it is something I never want to see, Yarvin's discussion of what he calls The Cathedral is an important place to begin any attempt to discuss the gradual shift in American society. The Cathedral is Yarvin's catch all term for the combination of all the intellectual institutions in our society: the universities, the press, the civil service, etc. It highlights a few very important points: the first is the term being singular, which highlights a peculiar alignment: on most issues, Yale, Harvard, the New York Times, the CDC, and the other components of The Cathedral can be counted on to agree.

Where there is disagreement, it's usually comparatively minor. It is certainly minor compared to the scale of the disagreements you can expect to see if you look at the elements of The Cathedral from earlier eras: Harvard and the CDC agree with each other today, and agreed with each other in the 1960s, but one only need to look at their opinions on the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-1969 and compare it to their opinions on the Covid-19 epidemic since 2019 to see that the Cathedral is entirely capable of changing its opinion.

There are a couple of other interesting things to note about the Cathedral, and these are that first it consistently moves in the direction of the left, and the second is that it is consistently somewhat to the left of the general public, but that it has also dragged the general public along with it. In other words, as The Cathedral moves to the left, it exerts a pull on the general public. While parts of The Cathedral supported decriminalizing homosexuality in the early 1950s, was almost entirely on board with this from the late 1950s on, and managed to convince state after state to do so beginning in the 1960s, it was not until around the start of the 21st century that a majority of the American people supported it.

What this shows is that The Cathedral plays a major role in shaping public policy, much more so than the relatively small percentage of the American people it speaks for. If the American people were to actually shape policy, then homosexuality would have remained illegal in much more of the country, for much longer. In many states, it would have remained illegal until quite recently; further, much of the gains are likely to be the result of people shrugging and accepting the laws as they are, and not wanting to open the can of worms changing the laws either way would entail.

The ways in which The Cathedral is able to alter the minds of the general public will need to be discussed in a future post, but for now the key point is that the opinions of The Cathedral gradually become the opinions of the American general public; and the well before this point is reached, they shape American public policy. What this means is that any bias in The Cathedral becomes a bias in the American system of government, and later in the opinions of the American people.

That there is such a bias is fairly clear: between 1945 and 2016 while the centre shifted, the relative positions of the left and right have tended to remain quite stable. If in 1945, in other words, a position could be declared to be to the right of another, in 2016 it usually could be declared to be to the right of it in 2016 as well. The shifting centre was the result of the shifting of The Cathedral, a process which has a simple origin: power politics.

Although the Cathedral liked to pretend it was neutral, and apolitical, anything which makes decisions for society is by definition political. When politicians outsource decision making to the civil service, they are not giving it to apolitical institutions, but rather to institutions which, whatever their status before, are now political. This has a few implications, but one of the core ones is that these institutions are subject to political pressures, just like any other political institution.

At the core, politics is a game of distribution: every society has finite resources, and these cannot be given to every cause. Someone has to lose, and the game of politics is built for determining who wins and who loses. The Cathedral creates a strange system, in which a good many people are playing a very deceptive game, pretending what they are doing is not politics, but rather something else: “Informing the people”; “Protecting public health”; “Educating the masses”. The core element, however, is that whatever they may pretend to be doing, these actors are seeking to either gain more power or wealth, whether it be for themselves or their allies.

In addition to the power seekers, there are a lot of idealists who took positions within The Cathedral; the professors who genuinely enjoy teaching and research; the journalist who seeks to inform people of the truth; or the public health officials who don't care about anything but keeping the public safe. These people serve a useful purpose to The Cathedral, of providing protective camouflage for the actors dead set on seeking power.

One of the most important issues in American elite life is self-deception: a large number of people are convinced that they belong to the later group, but are really in the former camp. Human beings do not like to be hypocrites, and so quite often when we pretend something for the sake of others we convince ourselves that we truly believe it. The result is that determining why actors in The Cathedral acted the way that they did, given the mixed motives of power and idealism can be impossible, even for the people making the decisions. This means that even many of the idealists are in fact corrupt, whether they know it or not.

As with any organization, there exists a hierarchy within the Cathedral, and prestige within The Cathedral is conferred on people independently of what the American people would choose. For example, a good many Americans would never tolerate Marxists in academia, but not just does The Cathedral tolerate them, it rewards them. One of the biggest risks for those within The Cathedral is of being outflanked from the left. As long as the position is not so far as to be anathema to the American people, in fact, the further left someone is, the more secure they are: the rules of the game within The Cathedral permit players to make attacks against someone further to the right which cannot be made the other way.

To provide only one example, few people within The Cathedral take the idea of psychoanalyzing the average liberal voter seriously, while books such as The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality are a staple. While it's permissible within The Cathedral to judge people further right than you based on association, it is impermissible to do so for those to the left. Scientific evidence may be entered to support a left wing idea, but even where there's strong evidence, not a right wing idea; and so on through the long list of double standards which ensure that in any debate conducted according to the rules within The Cathedral, the left will always win. Since there are only so many positions of power and influence to go around within The Cathedral, attempting to outflank others by adopting positions further to the left is a common practice. This also means that people who are genuinely to the left have an advantage, as it is easier to express and defend views you truly hold than to pretend to for the sake of power politics.

These rules were, curiously enough, enforced by both the right and left until quite recently. We'll start to talk about why so many on the right played along with rules which ensured they would lose next week.

Violet Cabra recently posted an essay looking at a somewhat odd phenomena, the peculiar way in which much of the American counterculture despises Jack Kerouac, and many of the other men (and the occasional woman, but the realities of mid-20th Century American Society being what they were, it's usually men) who made their existence possible. In fact, making this even more interesting, it's not just the figures which they despise, but the entire history of the counterculture: to provide only one example, the efforts to erase the Beatniks from history get just as much support from the left trying to ignore their heritage as from the right's efforts to portray the 1950s as an idealized Christian Hetero-normative Utopia.

I find both the left and right as they exist today quite odious, but for different reasons; the issues I see with the right are somewhat more complex, but the core problem with the left can be summed up quite simply: the left is based around dreams which only make sense in light of a blind faith in Progress. When I attempted to discuss this with Violet on her blog, she pushed back, and in attempting to respond to her, I wrote much more than would be fair to post as a comment on her blog.

The point I attempted to make will be explored in at least four essays: this one, first making the case for the cultural left being interested in transcending human nature by looking at on example of the phenomena, next week's looking at the role that the Dream of Progress plays in this; the week after looking at how the cultural right has played into its own defeat by buying into the same story the left uses, and then a fourth one discussing how this helps explain the descent into madness we've witnessed in the past few years. This madness includes a very strange relationship to the past; one which is a macrocosm of the issues much of the left sees with Kerouac, and so exploring it will help explain part of what Violet called the “Kerouac Paradox”.

It's important to note that I'm talking about the cultural left, and not the political left here. The cultural left and political left are heavily tied together, but they are not the same things. Since politics is downstream from culture, the cultural left influences the political left; and given the power the political left holds, it influences the cultural left, but they are not the same. In fact, one of the most magnificent accomplishments the cultural left achieved was convincing the political right to allow many of its institutions to go unchallenged: the “apolitical” nature of the universities, colleges, mass media, and civil service comes to mind. Attempts by the cultural left lately to hijack corporations and use them the same way, to push the Woke movement, are ongoing, but running into fierce resistance, as the right seems to have finally caught on to this trick.

The cultural left, as I'm discussing it, is the broad range of “left-wing” social movements active in society; the political left also includes and is heavily shaped by an economic left, which in North America at least, has scored a great deal fewer victories than the cultural left. There's been a curious leftward tendency in North American society and culture, since 1945, which has not always been matched by a corresponding shift in economic terms: this shows up in a wide range of places, and I'd be remiss if I did not state outright here that many of the victories for the left have addressed serious injustices. Others, however, have created new social problems and damaged millions of people.

Curiously enough, quite often these are in fact the same movements and often the very same victories. I'll draw on feminism to provide one of many examples. In 1945, women faced a number of legal and social limitations on their lives. The dismantling of these over the following decades, and the changes in laws and norms to permit women to manage their own finances, pursue careers on similar terms to men, and legal equality with men, brought many real gains to women, and addressed a great many inequalities.

However, there was another major victory for the feminists which has created a number of social pathologies, and this is the Sexual Revolution. In order to explain why, it's necessary to note that human men and women are different, a point which was not controversial until quite recently. The differences are partially a matter of cultural conditioning, and partially biological. The core biological difference, however, is quite simple: women can get pregnant. This makes sex a much riskier act for women compared to men, and so women tend to be pickier about who they will have sex with and require a higher degree of security before being interested in having sex compared to men. This is true cross culturally, and also of other animals, which suggests that it's biologically programmed into human beings. In western society this kind of security used to be provided by marriage, which was difficult to break both due to legal and cultural limitations; and for the most part sex outside of marriage was socially, or even legally, prohibited.

The Sexual Revolution changed a great deal of these legal and social norms, and moved them away from traditions which had evolved over the course of centuries in order to balance the needs of the community, both genders, and children. This is not to say these arrangements were ideal, but human nature being what it is, there will never be a perfect arrangement. Limits, trade offs, and compromises in which everyone walks away somewhat unhappy are always going to be part of the human experience. The old, restrictive (by modern standards) attitudes towards sexuality are a case in point: there are many legitimate reasons to complain about them, such as how they trapped people in abusive relationships, or prevented people who enjoy having more partners from pursuing that opportunity.

The core change induced by the Sexual Revolution is the radical reshaping of sexual norms away from this compromise in favour of a pattern in which most people behave closer to the male ideal: much less commitment, more casual sex, and a far more open attitude towards sexuality in general. For those who are not interested in commitment, enjoy having more than one partner, or are in abusive relationships, the changes to society that allowing these kinds of more casual relationships which are easier to break brings about are positive.

The Sexual Revolution got started by the 1950s, as evidenced by the declining marriage rates, rising divorce rates, rising teen pregnancy rates, and a dramatic increase in STDs, but would eventually have stopped without two external changes: the first was the birth control pill, and the second was the legalization of abortion. The reason why is simple: if every time a woman has sex she risks getting pregnant, for obvious reasons, people, especially women, will continue to be quite careful about who they have sex with, and when; meanwhile, the norms about having children out of wedlock ensured that unmarried couples remained far less willing to risk having sex than they would if pregnancy was not a risk. This is why the Sexual Revolution went into overdrive once the pill was invented: freed from that risk, people felt a lot more comfortable having much more casual sex; and one of the main arguments against casual sex vanished overnight.

Here, however, is where we run into a rather serious problem: human nature does not do well with the pattern of behaviour which the sexual revolution created. At first glance, of course, this seems like it should work reasonably well: freed from the risks of unwanted parenthood, sex ought to be nothing more than meaningless fun, and for some people this works. Given the nature of human biology, this usually works better for men than women, but one of the core flaws that many feminists have made is that they have lost track of the fact that the differences between men and women are not merely culturally conditioned, but also have a biological component.

The reasons that the Sexual Revolution proved so destructive are simple. For women, the problem is that security and intimacy is still a necessary condition for many of them to enjoy sex; and social and cultural pressures are convincing a great many of those who need security and intimacy for sex to be enjoyable that the problems, the reasons they find sex unpleasant or don't want it, can't possibly be that they desire a more committed relationship, or that it might relate to the sense of insecurity so many people have as most traditional forms of social support have been removed. Further, even if they are in a committed relationship, the social norms and laws make it much easier for their partner to walk away; where divorce was once rare, difficult, and stigmatized, today it is common, easy, and socially acceptable. The result is that even the most committed relationships can become unstable at a moment's notice, and this instability results in reduced sex drives for many women.

This strikes me as quite likely a major factor behind the rise in mental health issues among women, the rise in women choosing not to have relationships at all, and also in the rather striking hostility which many feminists have for male sexuality. Simply put, for a good many women, not dating and not having sexual contacts with men at all are the best way to deal with the current situation, where most if not all relationships will be unsatisfactory. Given this, it makes perfect sense that many feminists would identify the problem as male sexuality, since male sexuality is catered to while what many women need in order to enjoy their sexuality is not being provided at all. Meanwhile, for those who do pursue relationships, the lack of security makes sex feel less pleasant and at a deep, subconscious level, more dangerous than it did for the equivalents before the sexual revolution, who could count on getting support if they got pregnant. Even a woman's husband, after all, can choose to walk away if she gets pregnant and he'd rather not have a child when it happens. She'd still likely get child support, but money is a poor substitute for a partner.

For men the problems emerge somewhat differently, but they unfold from the same dynamic of sexuality freed from the traditional constraints going off the rails. The problem emerges from the fact that women tend to be choosier than men, and so a great many men will not measure up to the standards women desire. In the culture which existed before the sexual revolution, this was less of a problem: high quality men tended to be taken out of the dating pool quickly by becoming married, which meant that men of average and even below average attractiveness could find dates easily: the high quality members of both genders paired off, and so those of lower quality had to choose from among each other. Without marriage being permanent, however, these high quality men remain available, and can monopolize many women's romantic attention. When one of these men tire of his current date, he can rather easily get a new one, assuming he was committed to someone in the first place instead of engaging in casual dating, keeping several women occupied. The result is that a large number of men are unable to get dates with anyone other than the least attractive women, since most of the rest are not interested in dating, partnered with higher quality men, or trying to get one of them to pay her attention.

Many men are unwilling to settle for the low quality dates available to them, and the ensuing subcultures have created movements such as the incels. The same dynamic has also resulted in the normalization of porn. If most men do it, after all, then social pressures to restrict its use will tend to collapse given that most people dislike being hypocrites, and a good many men have turned to pornography as a way to address a very real problem in their lives: the utter lack of sexual contact and a complete lack of hope for changing the situation.

This also explains why so many men have given up on even trying to be attractive: attractiveness can be varied by a good many habits, but some of it is innate, and even what can be changed usually takes a great deal of effort over the span of months and years. A man who's of average attractiveness, or even well below average, and willing to invest time and effort on the task can usually become quite attractive; but will almost certainly never reach the top percentile. Since for most men the standards which most women currently hold are beyond their reach no matter how hard they try, they never bother to try to improve attractiveness.

Meanwhile, the other way for men out of this trap is to figure out how to be attractive to women in ways which are easier than pursuing the generic version of attractiveness, a trick which requires experience figuring out what women find attractive, experience which most men never get, since so many men are unable to get dates in the first place. The result is that a good many men are stuck, unable to get dates because the skills they need to acquire dates are unavailable; and so many spiral into porn addictions.

All of these pathologies unfold from a frankly idiotic attempt to ignore human nature, and ignore the fact that men and women are not identical. Simply put, in an ideal world the Sexual Revolution would work, and it would be both possible and easy for people to express an ideal sexuality. Instead, what happens is that human nature expresses itself, and massive amounts of resources and energy needs to be directed towards the cause of trying to make human beings (mostly women) act in ways which run quite counter to our biological natures. Witness, for example, the massive amount of energy spent on ensuring abortion and the pill are accessible and the enormous amount of propaganda in popular culture: massive media campaigns which try to display a female sexuality which runs counter to human nature, and convince women that there is something wrong with them if they aren't interested in sex under these toxic conditions are a common occurrence in today's world.

This example displays the facts which make the cultural left so distinct, in fairly clear light: the first that the cultural left sets its goals on making human beings act in ways which are quite far from how we are naturally predisposed to behave as a social primate with some clever tool using capabilities, and the second is that it is possible, after a fashion, to make human being behave in such ways if you have enough resources to throw at it.

This is the uniting thread between the numerous strands of left-wing thinking: the dream of erasing cultural, ethnic, or religious bigotries; the desire for pacifism and a world where violence is a thing of the past; the dream of a society lead by the people who know enough to make good decisions, and not the people who are the most power hungry. These will never work. Bigotry is wired into human minds because identifying members of the tribe, and who is outside of it, is important to survival for social primates and thus merely changes into forms which have clever camouflage against the efforts to root it out; violence is part of the human condition, and ignoring it means being at the mercy of those who know how to fight; and handing power over to experts only guarantees that that power hungry will become or corrupt the experts.

I could write a post on any of these issues, or others, noting how the transformations that have occurred as a result of the attempts to remake human nature into something else have not worked, but rather have created a host of new problems which are then addressed with various kludges. Human nature remains human nature, and attempting to remake it does not work: instead it creates various pathologies and causes immense harms. Further, each step of the process costs more in terms of energy and resources and causes more and more harm.

Trying to remake human sexuality, to say nothing of the various other projects the cultural left has embarked on in the 75 odd years since World War II ended, would not be possible except in a society which has access to more resources than any other in human history. The other side of things, however, unfolds from the fact that the cultural left has won victory after victory for 75 years, and convinced itself that it is the irresistible force of Progress driving this; and even convinced much of the cultural right of the same thing.

We'll start to talk about that next week.

1: https://violetcabra.dreamwidth.org/232644.html