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Konkvistador comments on Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum - Less Wrong
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I just knew the Socialist Russian commenter was you. :)
The post came off as bitter, as someone in desperate denial of how much he started rooting for Romney ever more the more the election date approached. But I liked it because of the bolded sentences in my other comment. I liked it because of how well it shows the sheer terror of the huge check reality is going to hand back to us one day if my and his model of the government and politics is correct.
Perhaps I was biased towards it because while on the day of the election I was apathetic, since I could barely see the difference between Romney and Obama both pro-wall street moderate theist stateist democracy advocates who like to bomb other countries. My apolitical stance crumbled when I saw everyone celebrating the win. The Facebook comments. The smiles on my friend's faces. The utterly creepy unity of thought. That I couldn't share. That I could never share. And I couldn't explain to them why, there is too little time, the singaling is so wrong, it would only cost me friends. I also knew I was far away from anyone else that even empathy towards me was not possible. So alienating. So alienating to see this in what I was as a child told was supposed to be my society too. Having to be quiet about it... I hated it, I hated all of modern Western civilization and wished it to disappear ground to dust by Chinese boots or drowned in an Islamic tide or surgically cut off from mankind to ensure the latter's survival, the wound sterilized by cleansing atomic fire. It activated my tribal brain.
The next night I couldn't sleep for hours. I couldn't help but see Obama's election as a sort of symbolic thing a signal "so right wing traditionalist reform is utterly impossible via elections, we aren't going to fix this are we? We can't fix this! It won't fix itself! GOD! Democracy won't fix itself! We are fucked. Probably since 1914."
To be perfectly clear I still think there is no real difference in an Obama or Romney win. Certainly nothing to worth voting for. But I've had compartmentalized beliefs about the world for some time. And the post election glow of so many people made me feel the implications of those beliefs in my belly and heart much like I had only felt the implication of natural selection being allowed to do horrible things to creatures after reading Back to the Trees. I found myself once again staring in the face of a world beyond the reach of God and I wanted it to go away.
Good comment, although as you can see I don't share much of your feelings except cynicism and weariness. One thing, however: why have you said "right-wing traditionalist" instead of "right-wing authoritarian"?
To me, Moldbug looks so curious - and suspicious - partly because of his obscurantism/doublespeak about "traditionalism", which I take to be something like Sam below always argues: cultural controls and policing against egalitarian memes, official propaganda of property-based relations (such as slavery, feudalism or patriarchy) strict and obsessively enforced gender dominance, etc, etc.
Of all those, he has argued for chattel slavery and yet against discrimination by sexuality - but as Sam would tell you, those are part of the same model of dominance! Screw "democracy" it's boring anyway- what would you say about those?
A right wing traditionalist is authoritarian, but not all right wing authoritarians are traditionalist. I was hoping you would have noticed by now that I while I think he is right about progressivism and power in American society I have my own disagreements with Moldbug. BTW Moldbug hasn't argued for chattel slavery as much as pointed out that the modern educated person has only ever heard the straw man argument for chattel slavery.
So you want me to talk about traditionalism? I don't know if I can do so with justice as my brain is thoroughly modern due to upbringing. But I will try with my broken mind to point to some traces left behind by the poorly understood institutions we have lost.
Patriarchy as existed in 1900 Britain was probably an incredibly good arrangement for most people involved. On utilitarian grounds I'm pretty sure moderate patriarchy wins out over the sexual marketplace of today. Before you dismiss this out of hand pause to consider that we have data showing men today are about as happy with their marriages as they where 50 years ago, but women are much unhappier. And far fewer people marry today. Let that sink in. So even wives that really want to marry today are more unhappy with their relationships than women who may not have wanted to get married that much but did so because of social pressures and lived under the alleged horror of 1950s relationship norms. I don't know maybe married women are much much unhappier than unmarried women and its just marriage becoming (even more) broken and unmarried women are much happier? But if this is so, where is the evidence of this? I haven't seen it.
In addition to this parents experience a much smaller drop in happiness after the birth of children if they are married (a proxy in the US for a stable relationship where the father takes care of the child together with the mother-- I have no doubt the difference is smaller in Sweden where lots of people just remain in that kind of relationship unmarried). So how is abolishing moderate patriarchy working out when it comes to personal romantic and family happiness of average women?
And aren't you someone that cares about economic inequality? Let us again look at the numbers. What happened to the relative position of working class and middle class families since the 1950s. If it wasn't for technological progress they would be living materially much worse lives, de facto they need now two working parents to reach a relative position that one working parent could acheive before. And I don't think you will have trouble seeing how the loss of status of the archetype of "honourable working man" resulted in loss of political power and weakened non-monetary incentives for work which contributed to the erosion of the middle class and the implosion of the lower class into the rapidly decivilizing underclass. Speaking of which how do men and women like the American inner city? You know the one with "strong single mothers" and thuggish boyfriends. Oh but that is caused by material poverty and racism and... but that doesn't make sense if you think about it like at all. Since they where doing better on measures of social dysfunction when absolute material poverty and racism where much worse. I'm not arguing for material poverty and racism or that they made stuff better, but they probably can't be blamed for the negative changes since the 1960s.
This has all been utilitarian arguing, once you get to virtue ethics moderate patriarchy gets really interesting, but enough about that. Its getting late here and I have other topics I'd like to touch. Humans have instincts to display fierce egalitarian norms. These are misfiring in the modern world. And I'm not speaking of the macro scale, I'm speaking of the micro interpersonal scale. We have the same social instincts as foragers, but none of the institutions of foragers to channel these instincts and we've just de-constructed the farmer institutions that evolved much more recently around them too. Re-emergent status games are more vicious. What feels like the cure, the mechanism that in forager tribes ensured equality and everyone being a productive member of the tribe, in fact make things worse.
And recall even in the ancient tribe man the sly rule bender found ways to have formal equality between tribe members but informal hierarchy. Explicit hierarchical society one that does not endorse egalitarian memes is one that removes much of this hypocrisy. We say we are all equal, but Ung decides most matters. We say the Louis is in charge, and Louis decides most matters. Which do you prefer? The non-neurotypical in me longs for a society where things do what they say on the label.
In addition consider the effects of status competition in a caste system being partitioned very clearly into several different status ladders. Can you see the space it leaves to developing healthy and adaptive norms unique to each profession? Can you see the psychological benefits?
Are you claiming that the end of patriarchy caused an economic decline leading to middle- and working-class families being worse off to the point that both parents now have to work? Because if not, your argument is a non-sequitur–if the economy declined due to reasons unrelated to a less patriarchal structure, then patriarchy having persisted would have made families worse off.
Personally, I think it's less a story of economic decline, and more a story of there being more consumer goods. Nowadays there are cell phones, expensive flatscreen TVs, tons of video game consoles/entertainment systems, and other things to spend money on, and people who don't have those things feel materially pool–but in the 1950s, none of those things existed.
Yes I'm quite explicitly arguing it contributed to it. I said this to Multiheaded right after what you quoted.
I guess the problem is that yes, I do have trouble seeing the "loss of status of the archetype of 'honorable working man'" leading to an overall economic decline that means both parents have to work–why wouldn't it be balanced out by the new archetype of the "independent working woman"?
I think I'm probably running into some belief bias here–I'm having trouble evaluating your arguments because, as a woman with a fierce need for independence, who is really enjoying life in this day and age, I deeply disagree with your premise that less patriarchy is a Bad Thing.
You're probably right that it's a bad idea for some men, though. Hell, I know some of those men–friends and friends' boyfriends who are in their 20s and still live with their moms. I'm also not all that familiar, personally, with the "American inner city" that you talk about. And I have no idea how to evaluate the fact that women are apparently less happy with their marriages–but if someone did a study on it and showed a correlation, then something is going on there.
However, there's no going back at this point (or, at least, I really think there shouldn't be). Why not wait until society settles into this massive, unprecedented change and creates some new archetypes?
Sorry. I'm really trying to look at your point of view with fresh eyes. This doesn't happen to me very often, that I have such a strong (and until now unnoticed) opinion on something that I can't properly think about the opposite being true. It's a somewhat unpleasant feeling, to be honest.
But gaaaaaah, I'm so entirely grateful that I don't live in the 1950s! And that's despite the fact that I've sometimes felt like arranged marriage would be just, well, convenient–the main reason I think it would be convenient is because it would be so much less time consuming, and give me more time to do whatever the hell I want with my spare time, as opposed to spending it dating, which I find tedious.
I appreciate your effort to remain open to considering this. I know it is hard to overcome personal experiences when social data contradicts them. It is even harder to overcome opinions that something that is good for us is not good for society as whole, you don't need to read Robin Hanson to see our brains aren't built for that. One of the reasons I dislike the personal being the political is that when it does people get very very defensive about any choices they've made in their personal lives, even when you merely point out they don't work out well for all people.
I'd like to discuss the role of loss of male status in connection to greater societal stratification more in either private correspondence or a separate discussion. I would ask we let that point rest for now so that it due to its controversial nature (and I'm less confident in the reasoning behind it anyway) doesn't steal attention from other points.
The social science is pretty settled that people we can be with in happy relationships are relativey common. For those of us satisfied with the other person(s) in our lives like to pretend those are unprobable outcomes. They aren't. Our actual selection process for partners also amounts to a pretty weak filter. The greater mystery is why we are so stuck signaling the traditional romantic narrative.
There is no strong utilitarian reason to implement those weak filters on the person itself if institutions can handle it better. You reap most of the benefits and you can get most of the good feelings of choice by picking between the three or four possible brides your family has suggested.
But how much do you actually know about the 1950s? The cultural icon of "the 1950s" is not only not the territory it isn't much of a good map either.
Sources? In particular:
Yet strangely, I have never heard of a romance novel in which the heroine has an egalitarian relationship with a nice guy who picks up her socks.
Roissy would of course dismiss your self report as a shit test and the rationalization hamster running, but then you would say that your observations are more reliable than my and Roissy's observations, because you are female and can see the truth from inside, whereas I can only see it from outside.
Downloading a girly cartoon romance at random, labelled as a romance and intended for a female audience, and skimming it: Princess is much younger than the prince, and has been given to the prince to seal a peace treaty: The deal was that she was supposed to marry the King, but the King took one look at her and unilaterally changed the deal, giving her to the Prince instead. Prince treats her like the small brat that she in fact is. Prince is a leader of men, commander of the army, and has slaughtered various people in princess' immediate family. The deal is that her land conditionally surrenders to the prince's King as a result of military defeat, but the prince has to marry her so that her people get representation and her royal lineage does not totally disappear. Story is that, like the King, he does not want to marry her, because she is a small brat and much hotter chicks keep trying to get his attention, and she homicidally hates him because he has with his own sword killed one of her beloved relatives, and his army under his direct command has killed most of her other relatives (hence the marriage)
Skipping over a zillion frames of the prince in manly poses experiencing deep emotions, thinking about deep emotions, and talking about deep emotions, to the end, they start to like each other just in time for the scheduled wedding,. Final scene is that he goes off to war again and realizes he misses her. He wears the sword with which he killed her beloved relatives in every frame except for a frame when they go to bed, including the frame where he realizes he misses her.
Well I did not check every frame, but every frame that I checked he is wearing that sword, except when they were in bed. As far as I could tell in my somewhat superficial reading, he never regrets or apologizes for killing off much of her family, and treats her as an idiot for making a fuss about it until she stops making a fuss about it.
My account of the story is probably not completely accurate, (aagh, I am drowning in estrogen) but it is close enough. Prince, Princess, sword, arranged marriage, and sword.
So, I would say that the intended readers of that romance rather like patriarchy, and I would not believe anything they said to the contrary.
I wouldn't know. I don't really read romance novels–I much prefer sci-fi and thrillers, of which there is more than enough to read. I've occasionally watched romantic comedy films–being dragged there by family members, usually–but a) I've never seen one that had a similar plot arch to what you describe, and b) I wouldn't go voluntarily anyway.
So you may be right that the 'intended audience' of that novel likes patriarchy, but I am obviously not the intended audience and I have no idea who they are.
Did it have an immortal vampire instead of a prince, a vampire who kills people by drinking them, instead of by chopping them up with a sword?
If so, I would say that would probably be seen by me, though not necessarily by you, as having a plot arch that was not merely similar, but for all practical purposes identical.
Much as all porns probably look indistinguishable to you, (naked girl moans a lot) all romances look identical to me.
All romances have a plot that corresponds to marriage as commanded by the New Testament, and endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century: Dangerous powerful high status male overwhelms weak frail low status female, but then falls gooey in love with her and only her.
And now we have a completely different system, and all the indications are that women do not like it, even though they said, and keep on saying, that the new system is what they want.
This is not quite the version endorsed by Church and state until the nineteenth century unless you replace "Dangerous powerful high status male" with "Dangerous but chivalrous powerful high status male".
I've read Twilight and ended up seeing the films with family members. I liked the action scenes. I think I miss a lot of the romantic cues–to me it's just characters looking at each other–and I think I skipped those sections in the books.
Well, duh. Having high status people fall in love with you is an obvious sort of wish fulfillment plot. I expect that females in the past who chose, or just ended up with, low-status men with nice personalities got less resources for them and their children than women who were able to attract high-status men. Maybe having that instinct misfires now sometimes–there are plenty of men who are extremely nice and caring and make enough money at their low-status job to provide for a family. But I'm definitely not attracted to guys who come across as significantly lower status than me.
The confounding factor for me is that I'm non-neurotypical and I basically don't experience physical attraction, definitely not at first glance–I can have a crush on people for their personality (or status) and I develop a solid bond of affection over time, and although I don't generally like being touched, I can overcome this for specific people with enough repetition and conditioning. But relationships are time consuming, and guys tend to start whining about how I always prioritize other stuff (work, school, extracurriculars) over spending time with them, which drives me crazy because if I spend more time on those things, it's because they are higher priorities for me. And I guess I'm physically attractive enough that I don't have a ridiculously hard time finding guys who like me–in fact, I feel like it being too easy is a problem now and makes me less motivated to try to make my relationships work. So yeah...there's a pretty high activation barrier for me to get into a relationship at all, and if the guy behaves in any way that sets off "low status behaviours" in my monkey brain (i.e. whining about how life is unfair to him, coming across as desperate, being unemployed, spending lots of time at unproductive activities like video games and generally seeming to have poor willpower, etc), it feels like I have no reason to push through the initially unpleasant-for-me phase of dating, because he wouldn't be a good provider-for-children anyway.
Those are all reasons why I'm probably an outlier, as female go...although I think, when queried in imagine-if format, my brain still gives the usual answer to a lot of romance questions. (Would it be kind of cool to have an immortal vampire gooey in love with me? Well, yeah. But if he tried to nag me into being less of a workaholic or not biking alone in downtown late at night or stuff like that, it would still annoy me.)
Probably–I've only seen 1 or 2 so I don't actually know. I'm curious as to whether they seem varied to you.
For a utilitarian to take this seriously, you need to make the argument that happiness reports are a reliable indicator of utility possessed. As you note, there are strong reasons (many connected to technological advancement) to believe that practically any alive today has more utility than the average person in 1600 (or perhaps even 1800). So that's some reason to distrust the assertion that happiness reports accurately report something that we should consider morally weighty.
Pending data about minority marriage rates in the 1930s and before, I think my response is "agree denotatively, disagree connotatively." Even without the gains from technological progress, it seems pretty clear to me that the average minority has more utility now than in 1930, even if the marriage rate is lower.
But the underlying issue is that I think that there are significant policy differences between the victorious community organizer and the losing business executive. There's a definite partisan slant about things like basic research funding and food safety regulation - I may be mindkilled about this, but I think any reasonable cost-benefit analysis shows one side is more rational about those topics than the other.
Still, there's always the possibility that I'm terribly mind-killed on this topic - causing me to overestimate the relative power of what I consider the saner parts of the political coalition of which I am a member. And the in-group / out-group smugness is terrible - deserving of being called out whether or not I'm in the in-group just this minute.
I thought we where Bayesians here? It certainly is evidence people are happy or unhappy. We generally consider people's happiness or at least mental suffering to have moral weight.
Yes, that was a bit of loose language. I agree with you that self-reports are reasonable measures of mood - and that mood is entitled to some moral weight.
But Multi discussed some reasons to believe that reports of mood are pliable and unrepresentative.
My point was broader: There's no particular reason to believe that positive mood is the same thing as, or even correlated with, utility. Utilitarians seek to maximize utility, not positive mood (infinite orgasms is not generally accepted as the utilitarian utopia).
Issues that you already know to poke holes in a simplistic model of "happniess":
Stockholm Syndrome; enforced and coercive signaling games around happiness; wireheading; "forced orgasms" of various kinds; smiles painted on soul; internalized self-deception under social pressure not to betray unhappniess with the "virtuous" life; the structures of "Libidinal economy" and the assorted Freudo-Marxian stuff...
You can probably see my line of objection, ja? I think you haven't given it as much serious consideration as I have given the far-right worldview, dude.
P.S. a quick google search also reveals that Alice Miller, a psychologist who survived Warsaw under the Nazis, has written a lot about abusive family structures from an anti-patriarchal/anti-authoritarian standpoint. Here is some anarchist (?) type ranting/blogging about the implications of Miller.
P.P.S. a paper that, in defense of Deleuze, criticizes Zizek's critique and rejection of Anti-Oedipus.
Yes lots of other possibilities, I'm well aware of those. I wanted to emphasize it that the simple truth is, that when people say they are happy, you should take it as evidence they generally are happy or at least not suffering. I did this because if this isn't pointed out people will avoid updating as much as they should using the possibility of different explanations as a rationalization.
Be honest, do you think you would feel the need to invoke or investigate those alternative possibilities to explain away greater self-reported happiness in nations with lower GINI coefficents? We apply different standards of discourse for different institutions without having good reason to do so.
Politics is motivated cognition all the way down my friend.
This depends not just on your definition of "happiness", but also on your definition of "say" :) How many pre-Victorian narratives by women/queers are you able to name at all without digging into Google? Only Jane Austen... and Mary Shelley's mom... and 1-2 others, I bet.
So, a lot of women might have, without having to worry their pretty little heads, "said" that they are happy through the testimony of their kind and caring husbands. Much like the Soviet people reported their happiness and contentment through their lawfully elected, not-at-all-rubberstamp representatives. Note that those second-hand assertions hardly ever mention sexual consent/rape or corporal punishment or other such things that we're curious about when assessing marriage. So could you please provide me with some statistics for e.g. matrial rape in 1700s Britain, to support your likely claim that it was not a serious problem? I'd be (pleasantly!) surprised if you could.
(What I wouldn't be surprised at is you quoting Three Worlds Collide about the space of possible attitudes to sexual consent. Well, as you can see sam0345 also has... interesting... views on consent. Isn't this evidence of how terribly dangerous - not just promising - it might be for us to become less paranoid and more tolerant in regards to patriarchy?)
Oh man. Sorry, but this is getting to me. I expressed frustration about perceived evasiveness, and then you frustrate me further by avoiding to mention what I've explicitly listed above!
I've said a million times: in theory I'm ok with absolute decision-making power concentrated in one ruler's hands, a succession mechanism can probably be figured out, etc, etc. When I'm talking about egalitarianism, I'm not specifically concerned with the interactions between a monarch and subjects!
Instead, I'd like to repeat:
(let's drop the issue of censorship for a moment. I'm assuming you're against it and, like Moldbug, want "free speech" that simply can't change anything power-wise due to the ruler(s)' monopoly on force and weapons.)
Just give me a plain answer of some sort: what do you want power structures within a family and in the workplace to look like? Along which Schelling points should limits be placed on a father, a boss? A child, a mother, an employee, a customer, a partner? Ought there be universal limits at all, in your opinion? I think there damn well ought to be, and they should at least act as a rubber band on disproportionate personal power!
I shared a lot of my stance on patriarchy and other kinds of institutionalized inequality present in traditional society. I didn't think I was being evasive. I mean you do realize that lots of readers here can't imagine an argument for patriarchy or feudalism at all right? But I can see why it seemed that way to you since we discussed a lot of this material already.
So you where among other things asking me about particular policies and institutions that uphold or purport to uphold say patriarchy or a caste system? Things like the inquisition perhaps? The old conservative question of "instead of what" comes up. Let me quote Roy Campbell on this:
"More people have been imprisoned for Liberty, humiliated and tortured for Equality, and slaughtered for Fraternity in this century, than for any less hypocritical motives, during the Middle Ages."
He does not seem to be obviously wrong. Its incredible how often this happens when you try and actually read let alone take seriously social commentary written decades or centuries ago.
Isn't this something else? Ok no prob I'll answer it.
I want workplace to be more forager and family to be more farmer. Nearly all of us are socialized to accept ridiculous amounts of workplace domination or what seems like workplace domination to our forager brains. We also get surprisingly little economic gain for this. Indeed I sometimes wonder whether us abandoning farmer values everywhere but in the workplace is a direct result of the rising demands of extreme-farmer-like behaviour in the workplace driven by signalling the market has been unable to correct (or has perhaps inflated?). The psychological toll was simply too large so we "loosed up" elsewhere to keep up with the workplace with bad results for our personal lives and mixed results for measured GDP.
In farmer family life children are treated as small adults with a unique duty to obey and eventually care for their parents. The parents have a responsibility to help their children fit in socially in their community (help them find a mate, an economic niche, make sure to maintain good relations with neighbours and relatives). The father holds greater formal power, while the wife holds great informal power. For neurotypical humans in farmer culture this is an arrangement that should in theory play to the psychological "feel good" triggers and talents of both. It also enables them to pair bond (preventing abandonment). It is a remarkably functional and stable institution considering it has had probably had merely 10 or 20 thousand years to form!
To give an example of dead legal Schelling points related to this, I think child custody should by default fall to the father.
This is an industrial age phenomenon caused by industrial economies of scale.
I agree. It has impressive productivity gains in say 19th century factory work, but I think its gains are much smaller than usually assumed in say a white collar setting. I think the cost to the well-being of the workers might now that we in the West don't starve any more outweigh the productivity gains. A good utilitarian counterargument can be made that we need every little bit of efficiency until we say cure aging or develop FAI.
Heck, I'm not convinced the gains in the white collar setting outweigh the loses due to the resulting signaling games. Especially now that routine secretarial tasks can be done automatically.
This is surprisingly Marxist-flavored analysis from Eugine_Nier. Not that the post is wrong.
Sorry, of course you're not evasive. We have a communication and inferential distance problem, I'd say.
Hehehehehehe!... has it never occured to you that - the "workplace" as such being an industrial-age institution - the domination in it that you so dislike (and quite rightly!) might be the institutional descendant of earlier family-like, harshly hierarchical structures? Imagine the power that a master held over an apprentice in a medieval guild, or the domestic slaves of Ancient Greece.
Our definitions of patriarchy seem to be world apart. It feels to me as if the examples you cautiously list - "the father holds greater formal power"-with-caveats, or "child custody" - are, frankly, local and minor matters compared to the really systemic things!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy#Psychoanalytic_theories
That's the big, scary shit to me. (Before anyone thinks about it, my father is just fine, lol! But... you've read e.g. Kafka, right?)
Some related feminist blah-blah, please take a look:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2011/05/05/my-evolving-definition-of-%E2%80%9Cpatriarchy%E2%80%9D-noh/
Also:
Replace "The parents" with "The Great All-Benevolent Church", or "The state social services", and you'd be alarmed to say the least. Of course well-intentioned help and guidance are very nice... but who sets the guidelines for it, and how is the information about children's extrapolated volition communicated in your society? In today's families - humans being humans and all power corrupting most of them - we obviously see parents' convenience and unexamined prejudgices advertised as "for the children's own good". Would there be less of that in your farmer society, or more?
P.S.: how "allowed" should, say, experiments with polyamory be? Socially, economically, legally?
The thing about family-like hierarchical structures is that they fail badly when applied to groups larger than families.
Well duh. Decaying institutional wisdom, the workplace is a hastily assembled modern construct from sawed up bits of older institutions banged together. If you set up a new institution the traditionalists will point out that of course it will suck. "New institution" also includes trying to use necromancy to resurrect one that has been completely demolished. Traditionalists are fucked because they are like archaeologists looking at preserved DNA in the gut of a mosquito trapped in amber thinking they can now build a working dinosaur out of cardboard cut outs.
We've had this conversation with regards to Christianity and its mainline descendant Progressivism. Best bet seems to be to try and figure out how to build a new institution building institution. Those are also know as religions. See Mormonism's impressive functionality.
You can't have patriarchy without the father having greater formal political and legal power than the rest of the family. The 1950s probably broke down partially because the father had informally greater political and legal power while formally having equal power which fucked shit up.
Remind me again which of these has had millions of years of data to hone their heuristics? Also which of these has the most obvious incentives for good outcomes for children themselves.
Edit: Why is this getting down voted?
That's probably true (especially if we add parallels sentences that say something about "whites" in place of "fathers.")
Given that, why should we return to the world where the father had great influence rather than abandon all the memes and ideas that remain that rely on that power disparity?
Made an argument for the viability of utilitarian pro-patriarchy position earlier, that you might have missed.
Because this egalitarian family does not seem to be working, or, indeed, even existing. The law proclaims equality, but instead of getting equality, gets family breakdown.
Find me a family where they equally share picking up the socks, and you will find a family where they do not share the main bed.
Egalitarian families suffer absolutely total dysfunction. Georgian era right, Victoria era wrong.
Why did this get down voted? The empirical evidence seems to be on his side when looking at most indicator of egalitarian norms. Like say sharing housework equally.
Well, firstly, there are all the fully general Burkean arguments. Not sure if those Burkean arguments can't likewise apply to the more established aspects of the "modern" family, though - it often fails, but it works even more often. E.g. traditionalists complain - loudly - both about single motherhood and two working parents... yet the second innovation doesn't seem to directly wreck anything.
I think Konkvistador's point was that the disconnect between formal and informal rules meant that some change was going to happen. At that point, I'm not sure that Burkean arguments tells us anything about which way to jump.
But it's possible that I'm misinterpreting Burkean reasoning, which I've always understood as saying "Don't court change for its own sake."
Okay, I confess: we have so little honest, trusted, hands-on information about old institutions, I just snap to assuming the worst about them even after adjusting for less decay.
OK, what if "the rest of the family" is somehow weak/timid/socially clueless/foreign/under-networked/from a disliked minority/whatever, and can't bring informal/"soft" power to bear in a dispute with the father? Seen lots and lots of times in literature! Works with the wicked stepmother and the spineless father, too. I fear some kind of Stepford Wives shit, but replicated with Singaporean efficiency!
Obvious counterpoint. Unless it's a TDT-using family (and we don't see much practical TDT used in real life... besides the evolved pseudo-TDT of religious/Universalist ethics, that is), every family has incentives to have its children compete and beat other children in zero-sum games. A big church or a state have incentives to discourage zero-sum games for all children, and promote cooperation instead.
And that does happen in practice, I think: most everyone who lived in the USSR would agree that its brainwashing of children was benign in that particular area - teaching cooperation and suppressing zero-sum games. That was only the official intent, of course; policies to that intent might have been as inefficient as everything Soviet.
I don't think so.
Compare East Germans with West Germans. Started off the same race and same culture, yet socialism made them subhuman. Germany has all the problems in assimilating East Germans that a conservative would plausibly attribute to an inferior race with inherently inferior genetics, except that in this case the problems are obviously 100% caused by recent environmental differences.
Socialism did not make them good cooperators, it made them layabouts and criminals.
And, come to think of it, that is a good parallel to the social decay we have seen following state attempts to impose egalitarianism on the family.
Wait, what? So you're OK with the hierarchy of a medieval guild or an Ancient Greek well-off household (meaning a household with 1-2 domestic slaves)? Because I'm categorically not. Those are basically examples of what power structures I'd like to avoid as much as the modern workplace!
How much do you know about medieval guilds? They are totally 13th century safety nets and trade unions.
Also your guild's rules are controlled by a council of people who have spent the largest fraction of their life mastering your trade.
You're an apprentice, but dad sold (contracted) you to a guy who doesn't like you for some reason? Good luck ever getting his daughter's hand to inherit his shit - hell, after you learn the trade, he might even fail you all the time at the (expensive and demanding) test of craftsmanship, and you'll either be his bitch for life, or run away and live in poverty because of your debt and lack of recognition. Hell, God help you if you run away at all! (And, while you're still a teenager, hope you enjoy how fists/kicks/belts feel, because you might be getting plenty of those.)
Can hardly talk about industry-related innovations. Good at rationality and optimizing production? Either make it all your trade secret as a master, in the privacy of your own workshop, or kiss your ass goodbye.
Every long established functional family that I am aware of, where the couple remained married, the grown up children love and respect their parents, and so on and so forth, is quietly and furtively eighteenth century. Dad is the boss. When the kids were kids, Dad was the head of the family. The family was one person, and that person was Dad. Mum picked up the socks.
So, eighteenth century did it right, and it has all been social decay since Queen Victoria was crowned.
Show me a family where husband and wife fairly share the task of picking up the socks, and I will show you a family where dad sleeps on the couch and Mum's lovers visit every week or so to use the main bed.
It is just not in women's nature to have sex with their equals, so the egalitarian family just does not function. Legal measures to make it egalitarian invariably backfire and fail to have the desired effect. Maybe after some millenia of evolution, women will evolve the capability to have sex with their equals, but right now, does not work.
Thank you. Frankly, I feel that you're being honest with yourself about the kind of tyranny you want, while Konkvistador clings to his rose glasses. I'd slash your tires, but you're a worthy enemy.
Please take note people, I believe that this is the kind of social atmosphere that "neo-reaction" supports, whether its followers start out technocratic/utilitarian or not.