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eli_sennesh comments on Neo-reactionaries, why are you neo-reactionary? - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: Capla 17 November 2014 10:31PM

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Comment author: advancedatheist 18 November 2014 02:49:36AM 1 point [-]

If you think seriously about what living a lot longer than current norms would have to mean, then you'll realize that everything familiar to you now will eventually vanish, and new things will take their place. Then those things will vanish as well, and other things will take their place. Just keep iterating.

Consider how much of the currently familiar things in our social world originated in an intellectual experiment in the 18th Century called the Enlightenment: democracy, egalitarianism, cosmopolitanism, feminism, secularism, individualism and so forth. Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition? I wouldn't assume anything of the sort.

In fact if I survive long enough, it wouldn't surprise me to see "regression towards the mean" in human society after a few centuries. The people of the world in the 24th Century might wield amazing technologies by our standards, but their society could have more in common with premodern, pre-Enlightenment societies than the ones we've known as products of the late 20th and early 21st Centuries.

I feel sorry for the feminist women in cryonics who don't see this as a distinct possibility of the kind of Future World which would revive them. They might find themselves in a conservative, patriarchal society which won't have much tolerance for their assumptions about women's freedoms.

Comment author: [deleted] 18 November 2014 11:34:23AM 2 points [-]

Do you think the social innovations based on these ideas have gotten locked in as a permanent part of the human condition?

They should, yes. They're correct, or at least, they're better approximations than we can otherwise create right now.